


The 0-8-4 Job

by page_runner



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Leverage, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Crossover, Found Family, Gen, Post-Episode: s01e05 Girl in the Flower Dress, Post-Episode: s03e03 The Inside Job, Pre-OT3, Team as Family, parker's past
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-09-23 16:34:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 21,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17083862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/page_runner/pseuds/page_runner
Summary: In which a stuffed bunny is more than a toy, a mission is more than a job, and a team is more than a crew.





	1. Before

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kiss_me_cassie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiss_me_cassie/gifts).



> I liked your prompts so much I COULDN'T CHOOSE JUST ONE! That's...really my only excuse for whatever this is.
> 
>  
> 
> (HUGE thanks as always to my magical beta, ferociousqueak, who points out when she has no idea who's talking and yells at my terrible puns.)

S.H.I.E.L.D. Evidence File  
Status: Classified  
Restricted Access: Level 4  
Subject: 0-8-4 Retrieval

Incident Location(s):  
Milwaukee, WI  
Chicago, IL  
Peoria, IL

Evidence Report

The 0-8-4 has been linked to numerous hospitalizations and fatalities of children and their guardians. The object creates a sort of feedback loop of impulsive tendencies, magnifying them and driving its host into more and more destructive and malicious behaviors. It possibly selects hosts based on susceptibility, though the indicators are hypothetical or unknown. Children are typically affected, possibly due to a lack of impulse control, or simply because the object is shaped like a toy. Occasionally, adults in proximity to the affected child are influenced as well, generally displaying harmful tendencies towards anger and aggression, outright violence, gambling, drinking, and other compulsive behaviors. Not everyone who comes in contact with it is affected and the level and type of response varies.

Those influenced by the object experience a driving need to do something, followed by a rush of euphoria when the action is carried through. There is little thought to consequences or resisting the impulse. Older victims describe the sensation of being caught in a rip tide, dragging them further and faster before they realize what's happening.

It is unknown what the 0-8-4 gains from its victims.

Removing a person from the influence of the 0-8-4 tends to cause similar symptoms to dopamine withdrawal, including anxiety, panic attacks, depression, sweating, nausea, generalized pain, fatigue, dizziness, and cravings. Most recover eventually, though their brain chemistry is never quite the same. Victims display impulsive and risky behaviors aimed at protecting the 0-8-4 over themselves and place a high value on its importance. Accounts differ on whether the object “speaks” to its victims or not, it seems to depend on the person, suggesting that it is a personal proclivity that causes the object's influence to manifest as a “voice.”

The longest known contact between a victim and the object is 7 months.

Current location of 0-8-4 is believed to be Peoria, IL, as part of a donation to the local CPS department.

Due to the innocuous appearance of the 0-8-4, location and retrieval present unique challenges.

9/14/1990

Assigned team:  
Phillip J. Coulson, Handler  
Clinton F. Barton, Field Agent

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

A small girl sat on an oversized plastic chair. She kicked her legs, enjoying the swing of her calves, her ankles, feet, toes twisting in freedom away from the ground.

They stilled as she remembered.

It was not a good memory, and still fresh, as fresh as the scrapes and burns on her hands. Grown-ups kept asking if they hurt, and she kept shaking her head. They weren’t what hurt.

A box sat in the corner. Partially open and forgotten, like her. She’d been told to wait here and waiting was hard, even when you got to swing your ankles, but the box whispered to her.

She slipped off the chair, her toes silent on the hard tile. Sneaking across the floor was just like sneaking out of the dormitory room to get a drink in the middle of the night. If she was caught, she didn’t get breakfast and they made her sit on her bed alone in the big room. Which was okay. She stole cereal each night—Rocket-O’s if she could get it—and only got caught about once a week. The grown-ups didn’t look under her bed, though they had been complaining about seeing more mice than usual.

She wasn’t sure what would happen if they caught her now, but something felt like it was about to change. Something big. And there was a box full of treasure. This might be her only chance.

A grown-up clicky-clacked away behind a tall desk, but slowly. She stepped into the shadow of the desk, listening to the person behind it sigh in frustration. The girl tried not to remember another person with the same sigh, stabbing at keys with two fingers. If she did, she’ll remember the last time she saw those fingers, white-knuckled and gripping the steering wheel and all around screaming and twisting and burning—

She reached the box, plunged her hands in, and pulled out a stuffed bunny, his golden fur not yet worn or dirty, like most of the toys she saw. He was bright and shiny and perfect.

She walked back to her chair, toes stepping easily across the tile. They made no sound. Even if they did, she would not be afraid. She had a friend now.

She was no longer alone.

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

“This a joke?”

Coulson glanced away from the road long enough to take in his newest charge, sprawled across the passenger seat, with his feet on the dashboard, and one knee sticking slightly out the open window. The kid wasn’t even all that tall, no reason in the world he couldn’t sit in a car like a normal adult. He sucked on his teeth as he read the report.

“It’s not a joke, it’s our first assignment together, and I’d appreciate it if you take it seriously, Barton.”

“Sounds like a joke. A sick one.” The wind whipped at the papers.

As he pressed the button on the armrest of his door, Coulson enjoyed the satisfaction of the automatic window on Barton’s side of the car shoving his knee out of the way as it rose, saving the file and their ears from the roaring wind. “It’s a deceptively complex mission,” he said into the sudden silence, “locating and retrieving an innocent-looking object.”

The kid rolled his eyes and tossed the file into the back seat. Coulson heard the pages scatter and tried not to wince. He’d read Barton’s file, obviously, he read every file he could get his hands on, but he’d taken extra care with this one, seeing as Fury had assigned him to the kid, promising he’d be worth it. And true, rough around the edges as he was, he’d passed through S.H.I.E.L.D. training with ease, making a mockery of all previous high scores on the gun range, even though he preferred his bow, currently resting in its case on the back seat, probably covered in paper right now. He shouldn’t need it on this mission, and that, Coulson suspected, would be a problem.

Sure, Barton could outshoot just about anyone, and the kid had a way of evaporating into shadows and corners before disappearing entirely, but he didn’t handle people that well, was untested around kids, and this wouldn’t be his first time stepping into a CPS office, even if he was technically an adult now.

“This is a trial run, to see how we mesh as handler and field agent.”

“On the trail of a _wascally wabbit_!” Barton smirked, sarcasm dripping from the last two words.

It was going to be a long trip.

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

“Are you listening to me?”

She wasn’t. She was a good listener, when it came to the sounds of tires on the road, the slide of the puffy, synthetic fabric of her donated jacket against itself and her skin. It smelled strongly of must and mothballs and pulled tight under her armpits, making it uncomfortable to squeeze Bunny as tightly as she wanted to. She did it anyway. She squeezed Bunny, and looked out the car window, and didn’t listen to the newest woman with perfect curled hair and a perfect curled mouth that kept moving and letting all of her words escape from it.

Bunny wasn’t a good listener either. In the dormitories, other kids whispered to their toys as if they could fill them up with all their fears and dreams. She whispered to Bunny too, but not because Bunny was hers. She was Bunny’s. It was nice, being someone’s again. No one else wanted her now, just like all  of the other kids she knew, but at least Bunny wanted her, so she must be special.

“And I don’t want any more of that stealing nonsense from you at this new house, you understand me? Bad girls steal. Do you want to be a bad girl? I swear it’s like you kids . . .”

Bunny liked it when she stole. Her whole body would warm in the rush of lifting the janitor’s keys to sneak cereal after hours, or stick her hand into every single Jell-O cup, or rummage through the pockets in the staff room for money and her newest prize, a shiny metal box that made fire when she flicked it open. She’d tested it, setting pieces of paper and then her hair on fire, running her fingers through the flame, each time waiting longer and longer, pushing back against the burn. She fingered the welt on her palm now, pressed it against Bunny as the curly lady pulled into the driveway of a small, dingy white house.

“Well, come on then. Let’s go meet your new family.”

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

“I told you that was a waste of time.”

“It wouldn’t have been if you hadn’t been so belligerent!”

“I was not—”

“ _Give me all your records, I’m the US Government, asshole?_ That’s a direct quote.” Coulson pinched at the bridge of his nose and tried not to level a glare at Barton.

The kid—dammit he had to stop thinking of him as a kid, even if he was barely eighteen—jittered around the small motel room like a toy, wound up and set loose. He should have known better than to let Barton come with him to the CPS offices or the group home after that, should have minded the archer’s twitching fingers and shifting eyes looking for a target to shoot off at.

“Now all we’ve got are confiscated bags of toys,” he gestured to the mess on one of the two beds, “an uncooperative agency that will bury us in a mountain of paperwork—”

“Paperwork’s your specialty,” Barton snapped, wandering back to the little kitchen alcove for the third time in under a minute.

“—and no leads!”

“We went for the toys, we got the toys! Could be one of them, or hey, _maybe_ this whole mission is a fucking joke Fury’s playing on the both of us.”

Coulson wondered exactly how well Clint knew Fury to consider that a possibility. “Stop pacing.”

Barton did, jerking to a stop by the window next to the door and fiddling with it until he managed to force it open. He stood in the chilly rush of air.

“If you were a kid with a cursed object that made you obey your impulse—Barton? Clint?” Coulson stared at the empty space in front of the window and the gently clattering plastic blinds.

“Agent Barton exited through the window,” he tried aloud, and decided not to put that in his report just yet. He shrugged into his suit coat and went after him.

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

She hated it. Hated the musty house and the dirty carpet, hated the thin walls filled with yelling. Hated his rough, unpredictable hands. Hated the sad helplessness and the pointless fury. It made her head hurt, and her tummy, and she could feel pressure building behind her eyes.

Stealing made her feel better so she stole. Spare change first, then dollars out of his wallet; the first smelling of sharp tangy metal, the second of cool earth. She loved both. Then she found the large  roll of small bills hidden in the cearl box, merging earth and sugar and she couldn’t resist smelling it right then and there and he caught her.

“Bunny did it!” Bunny didn’t mind her telling grown-ups that. He thought it was funny.

He yanked Bunny out of her hands.

“Don’t—” the woman begged, uselessly.

“You want Bunny back? Be a better thief.”

The idea solidified in the burning pressure behind her eyes as she tried to sleep. She lay, alone and scared and uncertain of the shadows carving up the room she’d been grudgingly granted. Headlights tracked across the wall, chasing the shadows away with their brilliance before running off to other places. She wanted to do the same.

Dawn came. She heard the woman first in the bedroom, then the kitchen, then the back door clicking shut.

The roll of money was gone from the bedside table next to the snoring man, but Bunny peeked out from underneath the bed. Dimly, it occurred to her that she ought to be scared. But then Bunny was in her arms, the actions completed before she had time to think about doing them.

Further actions:

Twisting a knob.

Smiling at the hiss of gas.

Flicking open a small metal box.

Dropping the box of flame from her fingers to the table top, wood searing black.

Slinging her backpack over her shoulder, shutting the front door firmly behind her.

Skipping down the sidewalk, Bunny firmly in her grasp, never looking back at the resounding blast behind her.

Off running to other places.

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

The call came three days after Barton went through a window rather than have a conversation, two and a half days since he returned (via the door, Coulson didn’t relish the chilly nights nearly as much as his charge did), and grimly set about destroying every single rabbit-shaped toy they had, under the theory that if it had the ability to control him, it would save itself. None of them had, and Coulson kept spotting further bits of fluff on the floor, since Barton hadn’t bothered with any of the cleanup.

They left that murder scene to arrive at a new one; the smoldering remains of a house, with one corpse (male) inside and no sign of the girl who’d been placed there, or the 0-8-4 controlling her moves.

Coulson waited for Barton to say something smart-assed, like he tended to when faced with horrors. But Barton was distracted himself, kicking through the charred remains of cheap wood. He’d been in the foster system, like this girl. Lacie Liddell. Coulson studied his new file, the girl’s CPS documents, freshly acquired with the help of his smile and badge, and by leaving his partner waiting in the car. Lacie and Barton could almost be siblings, with that bright hair and level gaze stripping away any pretense.

“So we’re huntin’ a kid now?” Barton demanded, voice sharp.

_In certain situations, Field Agents may display discomfort, due to personal history. Assess each situation as it arises to determine whether the Agent is compromised._

He didn’t think of this as throwing out the rule book, just hefting it carefully, to measure its weight.

“You go on ahead. I need to talk to law enforcement. We need to get to her before this thing makes her do something stupid. Stay on comms, and for god sakes don’t you go do anything stupid, either.”

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

She ran, but not quickly. Quick movement drew attention and she didn’t want that. Need that. _Ignore me and I’ll ignore you_. The bargain was a smart one and most of the grown-ups she passed made it, glancing at her quickly and away. By the time any of them rethought it, she was gone.

She kept Bunny tight in her grasp at first, as she made her way to the subway, jumping the turnstyle. The gate was almost as tall as her and she could’ve ducked under it, but she felt like jumping it so she did.

Down the stairs, a man, lively and dancing, played a violin clenched between his chin and his chest. His fingers danced and people were gathering, clapping, pulling out cameras to record him. Their hands and their attention wandered away from purses and back pockets.

 _It’s bad to steal_ , whispered a fading voice. _You want to_ , nudged a newer voice.

And then she was. Light fingers slipped in and out of pockets and the dark caverns of purses and backpacks. Her heart pounded in time to the music and she grinned at the warmth rushing through her as she ducked back into the crowd and onto the train sliding to a stop. She could wait to smell it later.

She slept briefly on the subway, uninterested in getting off, when this place was warm and moving and people only asked her if she knew her stop. She told them a random one further down the line, and most of them accepted it, but finally, a young woman insisted on waiting with her, so she had to get off and ditch her, ducking under the turnstyle this time and booking it for the exit. After the subway, she wanted to be high up, and then she _needed_ to be high up; walking into a hotel as if she belonged there and climbing the stairs all the way to the roof.

Up here, the wind whipped at her and Bunny, as they made their way to the edge. She could see for miles, out over the city and beyond. It felt like flying. She almost stepped off right then, because everything else today, from stealing Bunny, to turning the stove knobs, to dropping the lighter and everything that came after . . . all of it felt right and easy and good. Flying would feel like that. She could fly, far away from here. The idea sang to her, pulled her along and she followed it, right over the edge.

Dimly she heard a shout, and more immediately a jerk at her waist pulling her back up and over the ledge onto the roof. She crashed down on crunching gravel and a man collapsed beside her, panting.

“Are you crazy?” he gasped, like a fish stolen from a tank. (That fish had been Bunny's fault too.)

“I wanted to fly!” she yelled, frustrated.

“That ain’t how you fly, that’s how you fall,” he told her, pulling himself upright to sit, leaning against the ledge. Beside him lay a bow and a quiver of arrows. Like Robin Hood. He jerked his head at Bunny, still wedged under one arm. “That thing make you do it?”

“No one makes me do anything!” She glared at him, but he just twisted his mouth like he was trying to frown instead of smile, and pulled something out of his ear, dropped it, and stepped on it, hard.

“My name’s Clint. What’s yours?

“Grown-ups always say that to make you trust them.” She’d had a name, but she'd lost it in the slowing tick of a dented bicycle wheel. Maybe she and Bunny could steal a new one.

“Huh. They do, don’t they.” He didn’t ask again, just waited.

“Are you Robin Hood?” He didn’t look like Robin Hood. He wasn’t orange and his ears and nose were wrong. She couldn’t see a tail either.

“No, but I’m doomed to be asked that question forever and ever. Some people call me Hawkeye, or _THE AMAZING HAWKEYE_ ,” he said, deepening his voice and making it sound like an announcer on TV for the last part. He was a very weird grown-up. “What’s your superhero name?”

Normal grown-ups also didn’t talk to her like that. Normal grown-ups also didn’t carry bows and arrows. “I don’t have one. How did you get yours?” Maybe he stole his too!

He hesitated for a moment. “The man who taught me how to use this,” he waved the bow, “gave it to me. He turned out to be not a nice man, but I liked the name, so I kept it.”

She liked that idea. It sounded almost like stealing. “Are you a superhero?”

He twisted his mouth again, scrunching his face up. “Not ‘super,’ and not so sure about hero, either. I’m just good at this,” he said, holding up the bow and an arrow with a thin line attached to it. “That’s how I caught you. Any other questions?”

She bit her lip. “Are you here because I was bad?”

“It wasn’t your fault.” He sighed, met her stare. “But yeah, I’m here to take you in.”

“I’m not going back!” She liked him, but heroes, even not super ones, didn’t rescue bad girls like her. Besides, she didn’t want rescuing.

As he hesitated, her feet took her backward, until her calves bumped the ledge. Then she was standing up on it once again, feeling the wind snag at her coat. Behind Hawkeye, another figure appeared on the roof. He wore a crisp black suit and sunglasses and her heart skipped several beats at the sight of him.

Hawkeye glanced back over his shoulder and every line of his body tensed.

She stepped back.

“Wait!” He lunged forward, eyes full of fear, and managed to catch hold of Bunny’s ears as she tipped backward. She grabbed at Bunny, she wasn’t going to lose him too, and for a moment they had a tug of war, right at the edge. Then, something in his face cleared and he grinned at her. “This is how you fly!”

They tumbled over the edge together, wind whipping past, and somehow she and Bunny were inside his arms, looking upward as he fired an arrow back over the ledge, it caught, and they were flying, falling, shrieking in glee as the world hurled past.

Eventually, they skidded to a stop in the alley below, glowing and gasping for breath.

“THAT is how you fall.” He set her and Bunny down, hand lingering on Bunny’s head until she stepped back out of reach. It had been fun, falling like that, but she couldn’t forget why he was here.

He studied her and Bunny, and somehow she knew it was the both of them he was looking at.

She hugged Bunny tighter. “We’re not going back.”

Hawkeye’s eyes were wide and excited. “You feel like that? Always? When you’re holding him? Invincible?”

“What’s invincible?”

“Powerful. Like a superhero.”

She nodded, surprised he understood.

He rubbed the back of his head, looked up at the suit-man staring down at them from high high up, and knelt in front of her. “Can you remember something for me?”

Usually adults asked her to promise them things. And then they went and broke their own promises. But this wasn’t a promise.

“Look, I’m like you. I like to do things like jump off buildings and set things on fire, and say whatever I’m thinking. I like doing that stuff so much, I want to be able to do it again and again and again. And you can’t do that,” he continued, “if you’ve gone SPLAT on the ground.” He pointed to Bunny. “Does he like to do those things?”

She nodded.

“Then, he needs a smart friend. Someone who looks out for him. Can you be that smart friend?”

It scared her, that question. Scared her more than shouting men, and screeching tires, and the idea of going SPLAT. She hadn’t been the smart sister and now she was thinking about the car, the ticking spokes of the wheel, her brother . . . she didn’t want to think about that, and even a nice grown up wouldn’t understand things like brothers not listening and running off, no grown-up ever did. They just yelled about how she should have been watching. Which wasn’t right at all. What she should have done was teach him how to stop. But she’d never been good at stopping.

She wants to fall again and again and again. It’s the next best thing to falling forever.

And she was smart. Not a good sister. But alone she was smart.

“I promise,” she told Hawkeye.

He hesitated for a moment more, then got to his feet, shot an arrow back up the side of the building, and took hold of the cord trailing behind it. She watched as it pulled him up, up, and away back to fight the man in the suit.

Then it was just her. And Bunny.

They ran.

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

“What the HELL were you thinking??” Coulson demanded, not bothering with a pause to let Barton answer the question. “You let a little girl run away, to fend for herself with a dangerous object, and THEN you prevent me from going after her? WHY?” It was only after he’d given up on chasing her—for the moment—and gone back to the motel with Barton that the archer’d let them leave the roof.

“I don’t know.” Barton sat on one of the two beds, head bent, fingers loosely folding yet another escaped piece of white fluff. “Seemed like the right thing to do.”

“WHY?!”

He shrugged. The kid had been like this since he’d returned to the rooftop, empty-handed, barely even bothering with a lie, which frustrated Coulson even more.

“What am I supposed to write in my report? Barton pursued a six-year-old girl and failed to apprehend her? Barton located the six-year-old victim of the dangerous parasitical object and let her walk off with it?”

“I couldn’t take her back there!” He met Coulson’s gaze now and held it, frustration and defiance boiling over. “I went through a place like that, and people like that, and I ran away for the same damn reasons she was. I saw the bruises on her wrists, Coulson. I couldn’t live with myself if I took her back. So file whatever report you want.”

Coulson sighed. “I’ll make you a promise,” he told Clint. “I don’t know what we’ll do if we find her, but I promise she won’t go back into the system. And next time you decide to fall for a target, tell me, so I can mitigate the damage.” God, he hoped he could keep that promise.

“Yeah?” The hopeful confusion on the kid’s face hurt.

“That’s basically the purpose of a handler, son, didn’t anybody tell you?” Coulson threw Barton’s coat at him and ushered him out the door.

They didn’t find the girl, but at least they looked together.

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

“Get a load of this kid! Thinks she can drive a car!”

She sat still, arms extended to reach the steering wheel, the straps of her backpack tight enough that they dug into her armpits, just the way she liked it. And she didn’t think she could drive a car. She wanted to, so she would. It was as simple as that.

When she’d first snuck in, searching for a less cold place to spend the night, she’d been caught, flooded in light by the bright beams, and she’d stared them down. Cars took so much from her; she wanted to control them. But even more than that, she wanted the freedom they promised.

Boss Man laughed, like he usually did when she was being stubborn about something. “Our little parker wants to move up in the world, huh?” He leaned in through the open window, laughed even harder at the bricks she’d tied to the pedals. “You mix those up, you go SPLAT—” he slapped the steering wheel, trying to make her jump. She didn’t. “—you got that?”

“And if I don’t?”

He pointed to an open slot down the row. “Park ‘er there, nice an’ neat, and I’ll teach ya.”

She pointed her toes forward and hit the gas.

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

Phillip J. Coulson

S.H.I.E.L.D. Headquarters

Level 4

New York, NY 060504

May 19, 1995

Subject: 0-8-4, codename: BUNNY

Witness Interview — Cook County Jail — Chicago, IL

The fingerprints of Lacie Liddell, age 11, believed to be the current carrier of the item, were found on numerous stolen cars recovered during a raid of a suspected car theft ring. A cooperating suspect identified the girl based on her CPS photo and provided the following testimony.

Suspect: So she’s a runaway, huh? Everyone called her Parker. They’d have her wave the cars in to park them, see?

Agent Coulson: You let her stick around?

Suspect: Girl wouldn’t leave. Bunch of the guys would pull in fast, try to freak her out. She’d stand still, like a rabbit in the headlights. ‘Cept—she wasn’t scared. That girl’s crazy.

Agent Coulson: Crazy how?

Suspect: Well, man, you’re here askin’ about a kid who made a getaway driving a car she can’t reach the pedals on. That sound sane to you?”

Agent Coulson: Was she carrying anything? A toy?

Suspect: Carried a backpack. Nobody went near that thing. Couple of guys grabbed it once, just t’ tease her right? She stabbed one of them in the thigh. Woulda run her off then, but the boss thought it was funny. Anyway, what’s a backpack matter to you? Thought you cared about a little girl.

—END TRANSCRIPT—

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

It was stupid, trusting Kelly. Not that it mattered, but Parker couldn’t seem to move past the thought, which circled round and round her brain, like . . . like the water in the toilet that kept clogging. The thought smelled and looked as rank as that toilet, yet she couldn’t move past it, stuck in the lazy swirl.

Not that there was much else to do, lying on a bunk, ignoring the swirling chaos of the overcrowded room. She felt hot and cold, dizzy and rooted, nothing and everything, and her head hurt. She wasn’t a kid anymore, but she wished for, _wanted_ Bunny, and this time, she couldn’t do anything to make the wanting stop.

It was stupid, trusting anyone.

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

Barton was off attempting to make nice with a joint task force, chasing down some arms dealer in Bulgaria, when Coulson learned that the girl he’d flagged ended up in juvie. Since the lack of that particular agent resulted in a lack of paperwork for a week, he ducked out of the office early, possibly flashed his badge to ensure he’d get first slot in the standby line, and took a redeye out of Dulles.

The girl brought out to sit on the other sides of the scratched plexiglass was pale and dead-eyed. She didn’t speak as Coulson introduced himself. He offered her everything he could and a few things he couldn’t, but she kept her eyes down, hands in her lap, refusing to engage.

Lacie didn’t have the 0-8-4, according to her intake papers. Possibly lost . . . or stashed somewhere safe until she got out. The trip was a bust, exacerbated when he stumbled back into his office 12 hours later to find Barton inhabiting his chair, his feet up on Coulson’s desk, thankfully free of papers.

“You found the girl,” he said, tone dangerously even.

“She wouldn’t talk.”

“Well, you’re not as charming as you think you are.”

“Clint—”

“You should have waited for me! We should have gotten her out!” Barton snapped, cementing Coulson’s decision not to let him anywhere near that depressing cinder block labyrinth.

“And how, exactly, should we have done that?” Coulson could feel his calm slipping dangerously. He almost relished in letting it, all too aware of the promise he couldn't keep. “She wasn’t cooperating. She wouldn’t talk to me, she didn’t have the 0-8-4, and if she has it stashed somewhere, she isn’t going to share it with us. What was I supposed to do, kidnap her from a secure facility?”

“Not really your style, is it.”

“No, it’s more yours, and it wasn’t suitable to this situation.”

“Then use your stupid paperwork mojo!” Clint, in his time working with Coulson, had discovered the arcane wonders his handler could work with appropriately applied forms. However . . .

“To get a juvenile released from detention, I would need to return her to the system, or identify a guardian, or at the very least, even with S.H.I.E.L.D.’s casual observance of civilian law, give S.H.I.E.L.D. a reason to take her— _as I did with you_.” Clint glared at him, but his mouth remained surprisingly shut. Maybe he had learned some control in the last six years. “She isn’t an asset. She doesn’t have powers or special abilities. She won’t cooperate and tell us where the 0-8-4 is. I don’t have a lot of options here.”

“So you’re just going to leave her to fend for herself?”

“Well, that’s the call _you_ made, remember?” Any moment now, Coulson expected that glare to gain sentience, launch off Barton’s face, and maul him. Instead of waiting for that to happen, his charge  stormed out, leaving Coulson feeling particularly useless.

The day Lacie got out of juvie, Coulson was en route to Turkmenistan with Barton in tow. By the time they got back, the girl was in the wind.

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

“That was almost a neat lift,” said the tall, old man with a cane—usually a prime target, but this old geezer had Parker’s wrist caught in the vise of his grip and he wasn’t letting go.

She yanked hard, trying to overbalance him, but he twisted his hand just slightly, and she found herself on her knees, her wrist folded back toward her elbow. The move was simple, elegant, and frustratingly effective. Parker switched tactics. “LET GO OF ME CREEP! HELP! HELP! PEDOPHILE!”

“Oh, you _are_ good!” He stepped behind her, giving her wrist a slight twist before releasing it, and she scrambled to her feet, was off and running, before he could say another word. She realized, hours later, that her backpack was too light, and someone was missing.

 

 

“There you are!” The old creep grinned, as if he’d been expecting her.

“Give him back.” Parker tried not to stare at the bag he was holding, which she _knew_ contained Bunny.

“Would you like an ice cream?” He held up his hands as she backed off warily. A twenty sat, nestled neatly between his palm and thumb. He flicked it to his fingers with a flourish and held it out to her. “I’m quite partial to vanilla, and I’ll let you keep the change.”

“I want—”

“ _After_.” He didn’t raise his voice, but she blinked at the pressure behind the word. And just like that it was gone, dark eyes brightened by his smile. “I promise, my dear, I intend nothing untoward. I merely want to have a conversation.”

Parker glanced at a bag resting beside him on the bench. “And you get what you want?” It emerged more as a question than the challenge she’d intended, but his smile, if anything, grew wider as he leaned forward.

“Do you want to know how I did it?”

She did. She bought them ice cream, tucking the remaining cash deep into her pocket, and returned to sit on the bench, the bag between them.

“My name’s Archie. Archie Leach,” he said, as if he was proud of his terrible name. “What’s yours?”

She almost didn’t answer, but she liked her name, even though she’d long since moved on from that crew. _He turned out to be not a nice man, but I liked the name, so I kept it_. “Parker.”

“ _Really?_ Well, then, Parker.” He slid his arm behind her. “Would you like a lesson in the fine art of misdirection while rifling through someone’s pockets?” His hand brushed her shoulder. She jumped, and turned to face him, discovering he now held her ice cream cone.

She forgot about the touch. “How?—”

Handing her back the cone, he took a pen out of the breast pocket of his blazer and handed it to her. It felt heavy, the shiny black of the pen interrupted by tips and rings of gold. On the middle ring she carefully read, “PARKER.” Its clip was shaped like an arrow. Her breath caught.

“I thought you might like it,” Archie said smugly, and she didn't bother to explain.

Parker twisted the cap off and discovered, not a pen, but a miniature set of long, thin tools. Lock picks. Nice ones. Much better than the scraps of metal she used.

“I’d like to teach you how to steal it off me.”

“Why?”

“Do you know what a protege is?” At the shake of her head, he smiled. “It’s someone you teach because you see yourself in them. I am a thief, Parker. A great one, but also an old one.” He opened the bag, and inside waited her Bunny. “Do you want to learn?”

She picked up Bunny, held him tightly, and knew her answer.

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

Coulson felt eyes on him and glanced up to find Barton’s newest project, Natasha Romanoff, aka the Black Widow, standing silently in his doorway. She held a thin file in her hands but made no move to enter the room until he nodded at one of the chairs.

“I wasn’t aware you had an assignment?” he asked, getting right down the point. He didn’t quite understand her yet, or what she’d seen in Barton that caused her to defect, though he had no doubts what the archer’d seen in her. Coulson just hoped he was right, particularly since he’d backed his call.

“I don’t. I’m not . . . trusted. Not yet.” She didn’t seem to hold it against him. “But I was bored, and Clint mentioned an old case, a girl and a stuffed toy. It bothers him still.”

Coulson found himself shifting involuntarily in his chair. “It’s a . . . touchy subject between us, yeah.”

She pursed her lips, then reached out, extending the file folder to him. It contained surveillance photos of the back of a blonde head, accompanied by a tall, older man carrying a walking stick. Coulson knew better than to ask if she was sure it was Lacie “Parker” Liddell. Romanoff wouldn’t be sharing the intel if she wasn’t certain.

“Archie Leach. Thief. Seems to be mentoring her.”

“How did you find her?”

“I have my ways.”

He didn't doubt that. “Have you told Barton?”

She hesitated. “It seemed . . . unwise. My intent was only to determine if the girl was in danger or dead, as that was Clint’s concern.”

“And you think she is?”

“From him?” She pointed at the photo of Leach. “No, he’ll teach her life skills. Of a sort. Mentor her.” Romanoff paused, as if remembering some private history. “I’ve found no evidence of the 0-8-4, by the way.”

“Same here. It’s been about seven years, and no murder sprees, displays of pyromania . . . outside of the ordinary anyway. Maybe the thing’s gone dormant.”

Romanoff shifted, frowning. “Possibly. Are we—you—going after it?”

“Honestly? No. I’ll put in the request, but I already know it’ll be denied.” He'd had jobs go wrong and jobs go right and jobs go both… like the one that resulted in Romanoff standing in front of him now. But that one was the job that hadn't gone at all. A special kind of frustrating, that 0-8-4.

“Budget constraints,” she gave him a small smile.

“Things are quiet on more fronts than just cursed objects. Convincing the World Council and the Pentagon that we do necessary work . . . but you already knew that. That’s why you didn’t tell Barton.”

“I’ve seen the way people look at him; it’s not all that dissimilar to the way they look at me, but more personal. He doesn’t need a problem he can’t solve, and I don’t anticipate a cursed toy is high on anyone’s radar.”

“Why do you think I say ‘object’ as much as possible? It’s like hurricanes with feminine names.”

“Hurricanes?”

“The genders of the names alternate, but people tend to take the ones with feminine names less seriously, so they end up killing more people.”

The Widow’s smile cracked open slowly at that. “Little girls and bunny rabbits.”

“We’re pulling for the opposite, remember?”

“Of course.” She gave him a nod that told Coulson exactly nothing.

 

 


	2. Now

The warehouse loomed with a dark solidity that should have felt comforting after the day she’d had. _I beat a Steranko_. No. Wrong. _We beat a Steranko_. Parker nodded in satisfaction; tried to summon back the warm rush of success at a job done. Archie was safe, evil wheat lady was in jail, and her team . . . Her team had come for her.

She tested a smile, because smiling with your mouth sometimes tricked your insides into agreeing with your outsides, but she couldn’t make the feeling come back.

Today was a rooftop day, and even if it wasn’t, it would be, since her team had entered through the door.

Still, entering felt different, an itch to the place now, that she wouldn’t be able to scratch.

“I know, I know,” she said to the once-friendly shadows. “Time to move.”

She walked to the center of the room, biting her lip at the blueprints and plans, just slightly out of place. Just slightly wrong.

Bunny, still perched on her pillow, waited for her update. He’d been her companion through the planning and the surveillance, and had even tolerated her bringing Archie here, to show him her set up.

Archie’d been proud of her.

“We beat it,” she tried. Bunny watched her, waiting for her to be honest. She took a breath and finally let the words rip out. “I failed! We thought I could do it and everything went wrong! I underestimated the security, and there were laser trips in the ventilation shafts, and I didn’t think about internal communications or who would be calling the shots.” It felt good to yell it into the echoing space around her. Her stomach soured, enough that she could taste it in the back of her throat, the ache settling deeper into her belly. Pulling Bunny into a hug, she swallowed against the tightness in her chest.

“But they came,” she whispered. “I didn’t even have to ask.” Her brain felt like mushy cereal, drowned in milk and forgotten, but she could feel the nudge almost before it hit, the need to clear out, find somewhere safe and untouched to rest. She resisted, just for a moment, testing the idea of staying put, of the others visiting her like she sometimes visited them, dropping in through Eliot’s window, or Hardison’s balcony doors. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad . . .

 _MOVE_.

“Okay, let’s get to work.” She set Bunny carefully back on the bed and began to gather her things. She’d set up a surprise, invite Hardison for the final step. That sounded nice.

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

“You’re kidding, right?”

Coulson cracked a half smile as Skye, unable to contain herself any longer, interrupted the briefing.

“I mean, if you are, or this is some weird punishment for going behind everyone’s backs to let my ex-boyfriend know S.H.I.E.L.D. was on to him, then cool, fine, hey I deserve that, bring on the weird.”

“Not kidding, and do you really think I’d do that?” He gave her another of those odd, friendly smiles of his.

“You interrogated me by injecting _Ward_ with truth serum—”

“Not a truth-serum,” chorused Ward and Simmons for two different reasons.

Skye ignored them. “So yeah. Not putting it past you to pretend we’re going after an 0-8-4 that’s a psychopathic stuffed rabbit out to hurt kids by convincing them they’re invincible.” She tossed up her hands, silver tracking bangle sliding down her wrist. God, she hated that thing. “Seriously, it’s the least weird of the possibilities.”

“Here’s a tip for being part of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” Coulson offered. “Always assume the least weird option is the wrong one.”

“Like quantum physics!” Simmons’ enthusiastic smile died as everyone stared blankly at her. “Well it is. . .”

“Coulson’s been tracking this thing for years,” Ward said. “Last time he caught wind of it was twenty years back. Little girl blew her foster parents' house to smithereens with the dad still inside.”

Skye tried to ignore the way her stomach dropped, balling her hands into fists. “What happened to the girl?”

“Disappeared.”

“Not entirely,” Coulson corrected Ward. “Under the influence of that rabbit, Barton let her go. I’ve gotten a few flags on her over the years, but no chance to actually retrieve the 0-8-4 or get her cooperation.” He nodded to Fitz, who pulled up some CCTV footage. “A known accomplice of hers, Archie Leach, flew into Boston a few days ago. S.H.I.E.L.D.’s facial recognition tagged him.”

Fitz tapped the screen and pulled up a newer, sharper image, that showed Leach meeting with a young woman with that same bright blonde hair. They were sitting outside at a cafe, but subsequent images caught them at enough corners to piece together a route. The two barely even had their faces catch the cameras sprinkled throughout Boston, but they made a notable pair, walking together.

“So . . . what, we have no idea who the girl is, so you tracked a random guy she was caught with a decade ago and tracked him? That’s crazy.”

“We know who she is, and that she used to work with him.” Ward drummed his fingers on the edge of the table. “Now she’s one of the best thieves in the world. Real name is Lacie Liddell. Goes by the pseudonym Parker.”

“Sooo not a murdering psychopath controlled by a toy bunny then?” Skye couldn’t help it. _Just Parker_.

Ward ignored the question. “See what you can find on her,” he ordered and left the room.

  

 

* * * * *

 

 

By the time May set the Bus down in a clearing in the Middlesex Fells Reservation a few miles outside of Boston, Skye didn’t have much. Okay, less than that.

“I’ve got nothing,” she announced in frustration as the team gathered gear and loaded it into the SUV. “Like NO-THING. Hell, I can’t even find the records Coulson is talking about.”

“You saw the records,” Coulson pointed out.

“Right, I saw your digitized scans of them, saved onto your personal data drive. There’s nothing in S.H.I.E.L.D. or any other government system on a Lacie Liddell. There’s barely any news stories of thefts involving Parker, some suspected, but nothing that gets even close.”

“So she’s a really good thief,” Simmons suggested.

“That, but she’s either a hacker, or friends with a hacker.” Skye grinned at the full set of confused faces. “You don’t maintain a trail this clean on your own without those skills. By the way, I have absolutely no data on her from the last two or so years. It’s sparse before then, but until she popped up with this Leach guy again, there’s nada.”

“Nothing you or another hacker would think to look for,” May said, brushing past them. She hadn’t been in the briefing and seemed in even less of a talkative mood than usual. But pigs would fly and Coulson would let her drive Lola before May was going to share.

“Well, we have a live satellite of her and Leach coming to a specific warehouse together, could be that’s where she stores the 0-8-4. We’ll check it out, see where that gets us.”

“One of these days, it’d be nice to do a mission with complete intel, rather than let’s poke something with a stick.”

“You don’t mean that, or you wouldn’t be here,” Simmons told her.

She was wrong, but not as wrong as she might have been, Skye thought as she climbed into the SUV.

  

 

* * * * *

 

 

She wasn’t prepared for the warehouse.

Fitz got past the keypad on the door and stood aside for Ward and May to go in first, Ward armed with a night-night gun. May, as usual, didn’t bother with a weapon. Coulson followed them, signaling her, Fitz, and Simmons to hang back.

She didn’t listen. Or rather, she listened up until she heard May, on the other side of the open doorway murmur to Coulson, “I think she lives here,” and she found herself walking through the door, without making the conscious decision to do so.

There was a bed in the middle of the room, surrounded by tables and racks of straps and harnesses. A stuffed rabbit rested carefully on the pillow.

“Skye!” Ward hissed, somewhere far, far away. She ignored him, walking forward, caught up in the lonely pool of the light.

A slight rustle.

“Parker?” Coulson called out. “Lacie? You might remember me, we met when you were a teenager. I just want to—”

A pop, followed by a loud BANG. Skye jumped, shaking her head, as smoke started filling the air and a figure darted out of the gloom, heading for a door on the opposite side of the warehouse.

Ward pushed forward, raising his weapon to get a clear shot.

“NO!” Skye screamed, shoving at him just as the gun went off. The figure staggered, kept running out the far door, May giving chase.

“Dammit! What the hell?!” Ward yelled.

Skye backed away quickly, raising her hands, all too aware of the bangle rattling around her wrist. “I just—”

“That was her! Whose side are you on?”

“It’s not about sides,” Coulson said, stepping in between them. He snapped his fingers in front of her and she jumped, realized she’d been staring at the bed again, just a few feet away. “Go back to the van, I think that thing’s getting to you.”

May returned as she was trying to make her feet take her back toward Fitz, Simmons, and the door. “Lost her.”

Coulson sighed. “May, help Simmons bag that thing. Ward?”

“I’m unaffected, sir,” Ward said, glaring pointedly at Skye.

“Keep an eye on May and Simmons, and be ready to intervene.” Coulson took Skye’s arm and led her out of the warehouse.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, outside and apparently out of range. “I don’t . . .”

“You’re not the first.”

Skye leaned up against the warm metal of the SUV. “Yeah?”

“I think that thing attracts people who are a bit lost. People who don’t quite know if they belong.” He lifted his shoulders and gave her one of his half smiles. “It was Barton’s first mission and he completely blew it.”

“And now you’re babysitting me,” she said bitterly. Skye glanced over at Fitz, keeping an eye on things with a couple of his drones.

“May just made a decision about where she belongs, and Simmons volunteered for this and talked Fitz into it. So they’re the ones collecting and Fitz is out here with us. I felt the pull of that thing the moment I stepped through the door.” His ubiquitous smile faded. “You’re not the only one looking for answers, Skye.”

She thought about that as Simmons and May came out carrying a heavy, metal box between them, trailed by Ward and Fitz, who was muttering that he wanted more time to let the drones scan the van and boxes at the back of the warehouse.

“They could have clues!” He told Skye, coming to stand beside her to watch Coulson go back in the warehouse.

“It’s her home. Not the rubble of some blown-up lab.” She heard the snap in her voice, but couldn’t seem to care. Golden boy Fitz wouldn’t understand anyway.

“Right, an’ who lives in a place like this huh? That is prime pre-explosion property.” He spun a finger next to his ear. “She threw a smoke bomb at you!”

“Yeah, just a smoke bomb. Just a diversion tactic, and she had the jump on us.” _I’d have done the same, in her shoes._ Add that to the list of things she’d never tell her “team”. She didn't need to look for Ward to know he’d be glaring at her.

Coulson emerged waving away some remaining smoke and shutting the door behind him. “Okay everyone, let’s move out.”

“Are we going to track her down?” she asked him.

“I left her a card. We’ll stick around for a bit. Hopefully she’ll agree to talk.”

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

It had been less than a day after Eliot broke into the most secure building in Boston because Parker had some crazy idea she could beat a Steranko (and no, the fact that they _had_ actually beat the Steranko did _not_ make the idea less crazy), so when Hardison, all haywire nerves and octopus limbs turned up at his door to tell him Parker’d gone missing, Eliot merely shrugged and didn’t let him in the house.

Not that he didn’t care, but Parker’d gone AWOL for plenty more than this, and she was probably off shifting her whole depressing existence to another empty warehouse only Sophie would know about. _She’s not actually missing_ , Eliot told Hardison, _she just doesn’t want to be found_.

He did not tell Hardison how his own brain had relaxed the slightest fraction walking into that warehouse, all entry/exit points clear and easily surveyed. He’d been almost jealous, except for the lack of kitchen. But that was enough, a start reminder of how he’d dragged himself back up to something that could present a semblance of humanity.

He’d be damned if he was going to slide back down, even if he was damned anyway, the stark reminder of it currently spread out across his coffee table.

He definitely did not tell Hardison he couldn’t come in because everything he had on Damien Moreau was out in plain view, escaped from the dark corners he shoved it into when the team was around. Not like he was expecting visitors at 1 AM.

 _Stupid. It’s probably the most normal time for Parker to show up_. Except he knew Parker wasn’t going to show up, she had her own past shit to deal with. Hell, maybe she went back to Archie.

And suddenly Eliot needed to find Parker, because _that_ asshole wasn’t going anywhere near her with his gentle words and hard smiling eyes and impossible requests . . .

“I find her and she doesn’t feel like company, you let it lie?” he asked Hardison, fidgeting on his doorstep.

“Y-yeah, of course man. We could find her togeth—”

Eliot didn’t slam the door in his face, but he did shut it. Firmly.

He’d just started to clear away all evidence of Moreau; not much he can do on that end anyway, not until Nate got closer (which he would, he was Nate-fucking-Ford, which meant any move Eliot made Nate would notice) when his highly developed sense for trouble alerted him microseconds before he heard soft noises outside his door.

A quick peek through the viewer gave him nothing so he cautiously opened the door to find the retreating back of blonde—

“Parker? Hardison was just here lookin for . . .” he trailed off as she turned, stumbling slightly. “What the hell happened to you?”

She stared at him, eyes glazed and barely blinking, as if the question didn’t register. Meanwhile, Eliot noticed the scrapes and dirt on her face and hands, her torn clothes—the same she’d been wearing during their run-in with the Steranko—and how her whole body swayed, as if a slight breeze would tip her over. Her lips were moving, he realized, repeating the same nonsense word over and over. “Sokay. Sokay. Sokay. Sokay . . .”

“Parker? What’s _sokay_?” he asked, making a conscious effort to keep his voice as light as possible. The moment he said the word it registered. “Yeah, no, somethin’s definitely _not_ okay. Come in.”

She shook her head, a quick twitch of motion. “Can’t. Can’t. Can’t . . .”

With soldiers in shock, you talked in a clear, calm voice, and gave simple direct orders. Eliot knew this. He’d done this. Parker wasn’t a soldier, and usually didn’t handle orders well, unless they came from Nate, but he had nothing else to go on.

“Come into the house, Parker.”

There was that twitch again, her eyes still not meeting his. And then she was off, stumbling into a sprint and while he could move when he needed to, he was no match for Parker on outright speed, and besides that he wasn’t an idiot, though he felt like one, standing there on his front steps as she disappeared around the corner.

He was pulling out his phone to call Sophie, when Parker came hurling from the opposite direction, bolted up past him and straight into his house. She stood in the narrow hallway, shoulders heaving. “Had . . . to . . . trick . . .” she trailed off, confused.

“Is anyone after you?” He shut the door, locked the chain, knob, and both top and bottom deadbolts, turning just in time to catch her nod. “They right behind you? How many?”

“No . . . I lost them . . . yesterday? Is it yesterday?”

“Then why the hell—” he broke off, took a breath. “Then you’re safe for now. They gotta come through me. Anything I need to alert the team about?” He had other questions, plenty of them, but that one was the only one that mattered immediately.

“No. They’re spooks,” Parker said, breathing easier now and swaying in the wake of whatever adrenaline rush had spurred that last burst.

“Ghost or government?”

“Yes.”

And that wasn’t a helpful answer in the slightest. He glanced past her to the paraphernalia on the coffee table in the living room. “Couldn’t sleep, so I was about to make cinnamon rolls. Give me a hand?” He’d had no intention of making cinnamon rolls five minutes ago.

Her eyes shifted between the door behind him, the window in the living room, and finally to the square, enclosed kitchen, and nodded.

Tea first with enough milk and honey to hide the tea at the center of it all. Parker stood against the counter until he pointed at the small kitchen table and told her to sit, which she did, silently, after a moment’s hesitation, the movement a controlled collapse into the chair.

“How long you been on the move?” he asked, starting in on the cinnamon rolls. Dead simple, mixing in a bit of bran and flax seed along with the flour for carbs and add in some nuts for protein. Not all that healthy, but they’d be warm and sticky and make the whole place smell good. Scents were important.

While the dough was whirring in the mixing bowl, he brought her the tea.

He handed her a mug, poured a plain version for himself. Parker held the mug in both hands, though he could feel the heat in his own. “Don’t burn yourself.”

Immediately, she set the mug on the table, as if that hadn’t occurred to her before now. “What time is it?”

He glanced at the oven. “‘Bout 2 AM. Thursday.”

“Time isn’t working right,” she said matter-of-factly, as if that explained everything. It didn’t, but it was one problem with a simple solution.

He held his wrist out in an invitation, took a sip of his tea as her fingers fumbled his watch loose, tamping down the inevitable twinge of panic generated by her touch on his wrist. It was an old trigger, easily disregarded in favor of focusing on Parker’s awkward lift. She stared at the face, eyes following the second hand for a full minute before nodding in satisfaction and setting the watch on the table.

“Come wash your hands,” he told her, adjusting the kitchen sink to run lukewarm. She stuck her hands under it, let the water sluice off them, working away at the accumulated layer of grime. He went back to the dough, sliding it easily off the hook, plopping it into a bowl and covering it with a dish towel, while the tension in her shoulders slid down the drain after the dirt.

“This has to rise.” _I should have chosen something faster_. “Go take a shower and steal somethin’ from my closet. Part of him didn’t want her anywhere near his bedroom, but he brushed it aside. Old habits haunting him. Parker hesitated, eyes warily casing the open living room. “Any spooks gotta come through me, remember?”

“I know. That’s why I was trying to get here.”

_Trying?_

He didn’t get to ask before Parker pitched herself across the living room, tumbling down into a roll, and back up at the mouth of the hallway leading to the bathroom and his bedroom. Which wasn’t all that weird of a way for Parker to cross a room.

Eliot turned the oven on low and stuck the dough in there so it would rise faster. Sometimes you just had to find a workaround. _And your workaround for Nate huntin’ Moreau is what exactly?_ He didn’t have an answer to that, obviously, so he waited for the shower to start running before stashing the remnants of his time with Moreau and starting a text to Hardison.

There was, he discovered, no succinct way to sum up the last hour, and he didn’t want to call him and have Parker freak out if she heard him talking to someone. Paranoia could be an asshole like that. So he busied himself with bringing out the butter to soften, greasing the pie plate. His ma had always used a pie plate, the rolls rising and meeting each other to form a wheel, with one snug in the center. Always his favorite, that one, though he usually left it to one of the cousins, if, as usual, she’d forgotten, and burnt the edges.

The dough was proofed, flattened, and slathered with butter, cinnamon, and sugar, ready to be rolled, by the time Parker, having thoroughly exhausted his hot water supply and raided his closet shuffled back up to the counter. She wore one of his sweatshirts, with the hood up over her damp hair, and a pair of track pants, cinched tight at the waist to keep them from pooling around her ankles. The shower had put some color back in her cheeks and calmed her a bit; her eyes no longer bouncing to the window. _No wonder she didn’t head for Nate’s, that place is all window_.

“C’mere.” He showed her how to roll up the dough, her fingers pushing one end, while he managed the other. After a quick, mimed demonstration, she used the floss he handed her to bisect the snake of dough into perfectly even slices before placing them, carefully spaced in the pie plate, aware of Parker’s intent gaze. Her “room” had been set out something like this, with her bed and stuffed rabbit in the middle of her wheel.

“They took Bunny.” She said it low and flat, twisting her fingers around each other, as if they no longer had a purpose.

Whatever the hell he’d been expecting her to say, it wasn’t that. “Who are ‘they’?”

“I don’t know. People who broke into my warehouse.”

“ _We_ broke into your warehouse,” he reminded her, biting his tongue against the tirade that began _‘Cause you didn’t tell us you needed help_ —

She shook her head. “Not you guys . . . Other people.”

“Why would anyone take a stuffed rabbit? They take anything else?” Parker didn’t tend to react to shit the way normal people did, but then, neither did he, which should have helped him figure her out right now, but she felt _flat_ ; completely still except for those twisting fingers.

“No, just Bunny.”

“Did ya stash anything _in_ Bunny?”

“No!” That woke her up and she glared at him, exactly the way Sophie taught them not to do when they wanted someone to believe an outright lie. Sure as shit she’d stashed something in the thing, but that didn’t fully explain how anyone would know about it enough to steal a stuffed rabbit. _If that’s even the truth of it_.

“Nothing important,” she muttered finally. “Exit strategies.”

“Small bills and a key to a go bag?”

“Yeah.” She hugged herself tightly and Eliot found himself resisting a sudden urge to do that for her. _Abso-fuckin-lutely not_.

“And you said spooks did this?” he asked, to say something, anything, and get his mind back on track.

“I don’t—everything’s jumbled. But I thought I saw . . .” she trailed off. “I don’t know. I went home after the job and started moving and then there were people and they came in and took Bunny, and I ran . . . and I had to keep running. It wasn’t smart running though. Just moving. I got stuck moving and I couldn’t stop even though I wanted to stop so I tried to go to Sophie’s because she can make you do things your brain doesn’t want you to do, but I _couldn’t_ , so I ran and ran and ran, and it took so long to make them run up the six steps outside and then they needed to run back down again, but I think you talking helped, because I only had to run once around the block before I could go up the steps again.”

He let her talk until she ran out of steam and fell silent, breath whistling in and out through her nose, her whole form swaying with exhaustion.

“These’ll keep in the fridge till the mornin,” he said finally. The plastic wrap needed some coaxing to pull neatly away from roll without getting twisted or torn. He focused on that, on settling the thin sheet over the pie pan, tucking the edges under to meet on the bottom, pressed together until somehow the flighty corners full of static stuck back together. It was a simple detail, and easy to think about. _Ran and kept on running_ . . . The rolls would keep in the fridge.

He escorted her through the living room, placing himself between her and the shaded window, and down the hallway. He’d been planning on putting her in the never-used guest bedroom, but she kept walking back to his own and he let her do that too.

“Try to sleep a bit,” Eliot gestured awkwardly at the neatly made bed. He’d made it this morning, after another pointless attempt to escape the fresh reminder of Moreau and choices long since made. “We’ll talk to the team in the mornin’.”

She climbed into bed and stared at him until Eliot, against his better judgment, settled down next to her, on top of the covers. For one thing, she wasn’t the only one running on worry and no sleep, and for another, she leaned against him immediately, head on his shoulder, and he’d had better escape options tied to a chair in North Korea than facing the concept of pushing her off right now. He growled a bit, just to remind her that he was who he was.

“You sound like Bunny. He didn’t like hugs either.” She wiggled, pressing and sticking to him like that stupid plastic wrap. “Or people. But I gave him lots of hugs and I told him we could trust you.”

It was easier to breathe during waterboarding than right now, damn her.

“You can,” he said, and meant it with every fiber of his being.

She didn’t answer, and he recognized the distinctive solidity to the weight of her head against his shoulder. Even faster at dropping off than him, when she decided she could. He almost shook her awake, ‘cause she needed to know that.

He’d tell her when she woke up.

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

_She’s running, and it feels like she’s been running forever, lungs, calves, thighs all burning, struggling to slog forward in this dim flat nowhere. She can barely make out her feet beneath her, much less her surroundings, but she knows there’s no cover, no place to duck and double back, no clever escape she can pull. Behind her, follows a man in a suit. Voices call out, offers of help and threats tangling together. She stops, pauses for a breath and to quiet the hammering of her heart, and shots ring out, zinging past her, too close too close too close, and off she jukes again, wasting precious energy dodging this way and that._

_She sees the body, somehow, though she can see nothing else, she sees the body, long and dark and crumpled, and the final flickers of fear in dying eyes and she cannot stop running. She has no breath to scream his name. Time whines and shudders, like a car engine trying, failing to turn over, c’mon c’mon c’mon . . . but there’s the fatal click click click and it’s dead, she’s dead or caught and what’s the difference, really? She tries again, sparking wires together, praying to the only thing that’s ever heard her._

_It starts, engine roaring to life, and she stretches out too-short legs, pointing toes to reach the brick. Tires spin uselessly in the muck. Impossibly, she can hear the voices over the roar of the engine, and then she’s moving, speeding through the mirk and free—SLAM THUMP THUMP—_

_It’s quiet, apart from the tick tick tick of seconds, but the wheel slows gradually, spokes ticking round and round and she doesn’t want to look, she doesn’t want to see the long hair, the rictus of his bloody-teeth grin. The shouts are closer now. Her head and her heart and her arms are all empty, there’s nothing left to steal. No reason still to run. She turns and the man in the suit is waiting. He’s holding Bunny. She walks back._

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

Early on, Archie took her to the Riviera. The one in France. _One of my favorite fishing spots_ , he’d told her and Parker spent the whole trip stealing things shaped like fish, and, once that got boring, actual fish. Dead ones were too easy, and Archie yelled at her about the smell, and the number of cats turning up on their balcony. _Go catch a live one. In the ocean_. She hated the beaches full of people squawking and wielding colorful umbrellas, so she found an area of lonely, rocky cliffs ending just a few feet from the water’s edge.

Cold water broke around her as she sunk her toes in the sand, wiggling them to find purchase and dove into the waves. She practiced holding her breath, peering through the murky water in hopes of locating an elusive fish to chase until finally, when she needed to come up for air, discovered that the beach was farther than she’d swum, and only then did she notice the subtle drag about her, pulling her farther and farther away, wherever the ocean willed.

She panicked at first, trying to thrash her way back to her rocky beach until her arms ached and her mouth tasted of the salt and sea she’d swallowed, the water dragging at her implacably now. But she knew that sensation. The constant pull felt familiar, a current of thought become liquid. She calmed, let it take her, focused on making small adjustments, pulling herself along a diagonal with the current until finally, she felt it release its hold and allow her to drag herself to the shore.

There she lay, gasping and limp, until both sharp rocks beneath her and sharp thoughts inside her spurred her up and onward.

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

Parker surfaced into waking in the darkness of Eliot’s room, struggling to breathe as if she’d been caught, tumbling end over end in another riptide. Eliot’s chest heaved, limbs twitching, but she couldn’t fight back to him, dragged away from his dark form before she could see if he too was drowning, or rather crushed. She could only swim on, making tiny adjustments in a compromise with the current: a worn leather watch, a pause at her warehouse, two phone calls, a half-packed van to hurl her, ever faster, down the freeway and out of the city, the inexorable pull spurring her onward.

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

“You have something that belongs to me.” Coulson was surprised to hear Parker’s carefully calm voice on the other end of the phone. He’d left the card as a last resort, after Ward missed her with the night-night gun. Across the desk from him, May glanced up, tapped her comm unit and whispered down to the lab to have Fitz or Skye, or whoever was down there, track the call.

“Parker? This is Parker, correct?” Silence. “I’ve been trying to find you for a long time, Parker. To explain—”

“In person then.” He could hear her quick breaths.

“Fine by me.”

“I’ll send coordinates.” The line went dead.

May shook her head; no trace from the call, but Coulson didn’t expect one. “See? This is why we didn’t take off.”

“This girl evaded you and Barton. You know we’re walking into a trap, right?”

“Technically, she didn’t evade Barton, he’s just a big softie.” Coulson ignored the slight uptick of May's eyebrow. Maybe softie wasn’t the right term, but this whole job skated too near to thin ice in her past, right after she’d finally taken the step of returning to the field. He deployed the term as a distraction, even if she refused to acknowledge it. “But Simmons is sure there will be lasting effects from her exposure, and Fitz wants to get answers to his questions about the 0-8-4. Hopefully she’ll agree to talk to us. But just in case, have them stay here for now.”

“And Skye?”

“She’s grounded,” he said, and meant it, despite May doing that thing where her entire face didn’t move a muscle and yet she managed to convey her utmost skepticism. She and Romanoff probably practiced it in the mirror on girl’s nights. “She stays here, in the Bus. Let’s have just one mission where my nonfield agents are not in grave danger?”

“Aren’t you lucky I decided to go back into the field then?” She stood, offering a hand to pull him up as well.

“I knew you would. Anyway, we have the psychopathic bunny, so the hard part’s over.”

“Don’t say that.”

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

Hardison had long since mastered his own personal technique for skimming security feeds while half asleep. He found it oddly relaxing. Like sharks resting one half of their brain while the other half kept them moving so they didn’t drown. That’sright, he was a shark. But one of the friendly ones, obviously.

Things that were not relaxing: Having your possibly missing ~~crush~~ teammate call you at five in the morning and ask, in a dreamy, non-Parker voice, “Are you full of holes?”

“Am . . . am I . . . Parker? Girl, where are you?”

“Holes?”

“You’re in a hole?” Shit, no wonder he hadn’t found her. “Where?”

“You full of holes?” she repeats, as if nothing he’d said registered.

“No. Not any more than usual. You know mouth . . . nose . . . ear holes . . . uh some . . . others? What’s this—”

“Eliot needs to brush his teeth, they have blood on them. I couldn’t stop. Can’t stop.”

Hardison staggered to his feet. “Parker? Parker, what the hell is going on—?” The line clicked dead.

Heart racing, Hardison tried calling back, but only reached a mechanical voice. “I’m sorry—the number you dialed—” He hung up and called Eliot instead, trying to ignore the livewire of worry coursing through him.

Eliot answered his call on the second ring, his, “ _What_ ” sounding even snarlier and rougher than usual.

“You—you okay man?” Fuck, he was relieved Eliot was able to answer the phone— _bloody teeth_ — _couldn’t stop_ —“Parker called and she sounded super weird, askin—”

“Parker?”

“YES. PAR-KER. Little weird thief you promised to—”

“Parker! Shit. Parker? Dammit, Parker?!” Hardison could hear the distinctive sounds of someone who’d just been fast asleep scrambling to get up to speed. Since it was Eliot, it happened reasonably quick. “She was here. Fell asleep. Fuck.”

Hardison carefully stepped over the recrimination in Eliot’s tone. “She just called me on a burner. Asked if I was full of holes and said you had blood on your teeth and that she couldn’t stop. Any of that make sense to you?”

“It’s PARKER,” Eliot snarled. Hardison was halfway through an eyeroll at his mood when he continued, “She said she couldn’t stop?”

“Yeah, I thought she’d hit you or something.” Considering how often Eliot went and threw himself in front of cars, it wasn’t like that was a crazy assumption, but he hated the way the thought sent cold coursing through him.

On the other end of the line, there was definitely a jingle of keys, the distant thump of feet pounding down stairs. “She said spooks took her bunny.”

Hardison choked. “She said what now?”

“Long story. Get Sophie an’ Nate up. Meet me at her warehouse.”

“Put your earbud in!” Hardison yelled, trying to beat the click as Eliot hung up on him.

He did turn up on comms a few minutes later, presumably after getting some preliminary grouching out of his system, so he’d be all warmed up to rail at Hardison. By the time Hardison woke Nate, predictably hungover, and found Sophie at the cafe on the corner, buying two coffees, one of which she passed deliberately to Hardison upon seeing Nate driving the van, he had the gist of what Parker’d told Eliot a few hours before.

The coffee was black, strong, and absolutely disgustingly bitter. He handed it up to Nate, it’s rightful owner, no matter what Sophie wanted to claim, and let Eliot field Sophie’s increasingly confused questions, as he turned back to his computers, scanning the footage of the traffic cams around Parker’s warehouse, since Eliot seemed certain she was going back there. He caught a glimpse of one of the white service vans they sometimes used for jobs leaving Parker’s neighborhood—if you could call it that. Time stamp: 5:08. Right after she’d called him.

“Parker’s gone, left the warehouse in a white van, heading west about an hour ago.”

“Can you track her?” Eliot asked. “Just got here, heading in.”

“Code on the keypad is my real name, Eliot,” Sophie said, unable to resist her little dig at Nate who made an irritated sound deep in his throat.

“Door’s open.”

Nate made a different sound. “Careful, Eliot.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Hardison managed to track the van for another few miles before losing it in onslaught of pre-rush hour traffic, the time of day when the streets were ruled by delivery and service vans that looked identical to Parker’s. Or his brand-new shiny Lucille, for that matter. “Lost her.”

Nate turned into the area in front of Parker’s warehouse, just as Eliot started to respond and cut off with a friendly, “Hey, folks—” that absolutely meant shit was about to go down. Hardison didn’t have time to register any more than that before he was pitched against the back door by Nate hitting the gas.

“What the—”

“OI!” Sophie shouted, and Hardison heard the whoosh of her door opening, followed by a solid _thump_ as it connected with something.

Over the comms, Eliot growled “C’mon,” low and ragged, which Hardison really hoped meant he was winning, Eliot being Eliot . . .

“We got this one, go help Eliot!” Nate ordered, jumping out of the van as Hardison picked himself off the floor and scrambled out the back door. He ran past Nate grabbing a guy wearing a suit in a head lock as Sophie strode up, and decided that yes, they did have this covered, time to see what Eliot was up to.

Inside, Eliot traded punches with a taller man, while a slight figure picked herself up off the ground, where she’d probably been thrown. She dove back in, moving easily around her partner, as Eliot gave ground, only casting the slightest glance toward Hardison. If he signaled anything, Hardison missed it, but he doubted Eliot had the time. His opponents fought efficiently, the dull sound of fists and elbows getting caught in blocks or slipping through as they traded places, trying to wear Eliot down.

Usually he’d have at least one of them eliminated by this point, Hardison realized, his stomach twisting. Not good. He cast about for something, anything that he could use, create a distraction maybe? His toe hit an object on the ground, and he picked it up.

It was a gun. No, not a gun, or at least not any type of handgun Hardison had ever seen. Ribs of blue ran across the top of it. Alien tech out of New York? But he’d seen scans of that stuff online (and okay maybe bought a few things on the black market that he hadn’t had a chance to play with yet) and this wasn’t like that. The magazine held cartridges shaped like bullets, except they weren’t metal, or rubber, maybe some kind of plastic?

Eliot crashed to the ground, staggered upright again, shaking his hair out of his eyes. He bared bloody teeth. The woman tackled him from behind, as the taller man lunged. Eliot kicked out, using her as support to propel the man backward.

This was his chance. “HEY!” he shouted and all three of them paused at the sight of Hardison pointing the gun at the man about to rush back into the fight. He didn’t put his hands up, or run away, or rush at Hardison. Instead he charged Eliot again as if he didn’t care that someone was pointing a loaded weapon at him. _Odds are nonlethal then_. He fired at the figure and kept firing until the man collapsed or the clip ran out, whichever came first, though if anyone asked him later he wouldn’t have been able to say.

Eliot escaped the woman’s grasp and swung his gaze from his downed opponent, to Hardison, and back to the woman in front of him.

She did the same, then held up her hands, straightening. “Slightly overkill,” she remarked, her voice devoid of anything except a touch of dry sarcasm.

“May! Stand down,” came a new voice, also calm—why was everyone so calm when his heart felt like it was tied to a galloping horse? The new voice was attached to the nondescript man in a now torn suit, one side of his face quickly bruising.

May, Eliot’s still standing opponent, did not stand down. If anything she straightened, scowling. “You alright? He—” she nodded at Hardison, “emptied the entire clip at Ward.” Hardison thought she meant it in anger; he started looking back at the fallen man, trying to see if he was wrong, if a pool of blood was starting to form—“We’re still at even odds.”

Okay, now that seemed a bit overconfident. Hardison almost felt bad for shooting Ward so many times.

Eliot glowered at her. “Oh, we playin’ nice now, May?”

“I don’t play nice, Spencer.”

“Why am I not surprised y’all know each other!” Hardison threw up his hands.

“Those of us who don’t are about to,” Sophie said briskly, coming in behind The Suit and Nate. “We’ve been having a nice little chat outside.” Her smile suggested terms like “nice” and “chat” should be taken loosely.

Nate tugged at his collar.

“Musta been some chat,” Hardison muttered.

Nate coughed. “Eliot, collect their phones and any comm devices.”

Hardison jumped as Sophie appeared next to him. “I’ll take that darling,” she said gently, prying the weird, empty gun from his hands.

He let her have it, and accepted the devices Eliot handed him, trying not to stare at his teeth. It wasn’t like he’d never seen Eliot with bloody teeth before. Not to mention the nasty cut above his eye and careful way he walked. That was what Eliot did. Eliot also glared when Hardison stared too much, so he set his hands to work, removing the SIM cards from the phones he’d been given and crushing the comms beneath his feet. His fingers itched to dive deeper into the phones, but he left them alone. For now.

“Was that really necessary?” The Suit asked. He didn’t seem at all irritated. It was weirdly unnerving.

Nate spread his hands. “Just ensuring we don’t get interrupted. This,” he continued, “is Phil Coulson, of S.H.I.E.L.D. He’s going to tell us what he did to Parker.” Nate’s tone was also unnervingly calm, with that underlying edge it took on when he flipped some internal switch from apathy to anger and it started to seep out, filling in the cracks.

Behind him, May watched patiently, showing no sign she’d actually been in a fight. “Great plan, Phil,” she said, tone crackling with dryness.

“What can I say? I have a talent.” He smiled easily. “Look, I’m trying to cooperate here! You hit me with a car, he shot one of my agents—”

 “I had to help Eliot!”

“Who said I needed help??”

May arched an eyebrow. “Please. You definitely needed help.”

“Thought you were out of the game.” Eliot growled at her.

“Heard the same.” She shrugged. “I was. Phil’s persuasive.”

“Eliot, if you’re done flirtin’ . . .”

“I ain’t—”

“GUYS.” Nate cut in.

“Your team sounds like my team,” Coulson commented, having the indecency to sound amused.  _Right, you just try an build a rapport…_

Eliot frowned. Okay, Eliot was usually frowning, but this was his re-evaluate-according-to-the-Eliot-encyclopedia-that-hides-under-all-that-hair frown. “Phil Coulson?” He turned to Sophie. “He tellin’ the truth?”

She held up a wallet and badge with a grin. “According to these, yes, but we all know how simple it is too nick...” she coughed, “ahem, _pick_ up the wrong one . . .”

“Eliot?” Nate asked.

“Phillip Coulson died in New York,” Eliot told Nate. “Word gets around,” he added, almost apologetically to the not-dead guy in front of him.

“Apparently. And technically yes, permanently no.”

“Phil—” May said, tone ripe with long-suffering exasperation.

“Look, I don’t know where Parker is. She set up this meeting. Here. Which we came to, fully aware it was probably a trap, and now that’s happened, nice job, I’d really appreciate a chance to talk to her about that rabbit.”

“She ain’t here. And we haven’t covered what you did to her.”

“Not to get caught up on technicalities again, but nothing. We—my team—are trying to help her.”

“She doesn’t need your help!” Hardison bit his lip at the bitter fury in Eliot’s voice. “You guys break into her home, steal the thing she cares about most, and claim you’re tryin’ t’ _help_?”

“You seem to know quite a bit about me, Mr. Spencer. What do you know about S.H.I.E.L.D.?”

“Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement Logistical Division,” Hardison rattled off, tired of letting Eliot do all the talking. “You do the weird stuff.”

“Not the way I’d put it, but yes. And that rabbit of hers is _weird_.”


	5. Chapter 5

The pull that’d been dragging her along dumped Parker at the edge of a clearing. It clawed at her, trying to haul her into the early morning light, but she was a child of shadows. She stood her ground. It hurt, resisting. Spikes drove themselves through her skull as the world spun and danced, knees slamming into the ground before she understood she was falling. Everything narrowed to the center of the clearing, shining like a diamond on display.

Parker bared her teeth in a grin. So. That was the target. She needed to case the area, determine any security risks, locate and retrieve . . . _what? Why am I here?_

For a brief instant, everything wavered, questions and hesitations, and precautions, and doubts a tidal wave crashing over her. She stumbled sideways, against a tree, focused on breathing deep, inhaling through her nose, eyes closed against the stupid spinning world and all of its stupid spinning questions.

The forest smelled of metal and heat and ozone.

She’d been too distracted before, but something was out of place here. Slowly, carefully, Parker blinked her eyes open, waited for the world to settle as much as it would, and stared at the clearing. On closer examination, she could see the distortion of something very large trying to be invisible. Quite the neat trick. Maybe she could steal it.

She couldn’t hear any people trying to be invisible, so she crept forward, keeping her hands out in front of her, until she felt a slight warmth on her face, traced the shell of the giant machine with her fingertips. Now that she was closer, underneath it, in fact, the marring and glitches in its surface were clear. She could make out the roundness of the underbelly, and a giant wing. ( _Hardison would be freaking out right now._ ) She wanted to call him, tell him that there was an invisible plane in the middle of the woods and he needed to get off his computer to share it with her.

 _NO_.

It wasn’t a word, exactly, more a full-forced rejection of the entire concept. It knocked her to her knees. Parker gripped fistfuls of grass shoved flat by the plane’s landing, understanding how it felt.

Okay. Parameters. She ignored the pressured fury and pushed herself upright. Clever fingers found a hidden access panel, pressing along it until she located the catch, released it and pulled herself inside.

It cost her, the series of usually simple motions. She lay on her side, head swimming, and considered whether vomiting would be a good idea, but she was inside now, and the time to do that was back in the woods. She swallowed instead, taking in the crawlspace between the outer metal and the floor a few feet above her. It was quiet here, if she stayed still, like a flattened ventilation shaft. _I should check for trip wires. I should have checked Eliot. I should have called Hardison—did I call Hardison? But this is my problem_.

_Like the Steranko?_

No. The Steranko was Archie’s problem, and she’d been Archie’s problem too, at one point. They could cancel each other out. Like a negative and a positive. Except they almost had and she’d needed a few more positives to make it actually work. Bad math. She’d screwed up. Again.

Voices. They slowly drift into her awareness, coalesce themselves into syllables, words, sentences. “. . . from the limited readings I’m getting . . .”

“. . . we need to take it out to get more information, but . . .”

“. . . But Coulson told us to keep it contained, Fitz, and he’s the one who has the most experience, so we’ll wait for him . . .”

“Jemma, he’s going to want answers, and who knows if he’ll get that girl to come . . .”

“Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if that girl was catatonic, based on this, I mean just _look_ . . . Fitz! He said to keep the rabbit contained!”

Parker blinked, forced stiff muscles to unlock, wincing at the cramps. Catatonic? Never. But the voices sounded like they had Bunny. Even if everything else was gibberish.

She’d just found a crack of light that promised an access hatch into the main part of the plane, when the riptide caught hold.

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

Skye was, not, absolutely not, moping in the galley, when she heard a crash, a scream, a gunshot, and a cry of _FITZ!_ ring out. Possibly not in exactly that order, but she wasn’t far off, she decided, as she came to a stop just inside the lab’s glass doors.

A blonde girl lay unconscious on the ground. Fitz was holding his arm tightly in his opposite hand as blood welled through his shirtsleeve, the prototype of the night-night gun lying at his feet. Oh, and Simmons was about to blowtorch a stuffed rabbit.

“WHAT?” she managed, sure there were words that should follow, but she honestly couldn’t think of any suitable to the occasion. Rare, that.

“She—she bit me!”

“Well, of course she bit you,” Simmons snapped uncharacteristically. “You were being a bloody idiot!”

“I thought—”

“You thought you were immune to a psychic rabbit!”

“Kinda?”

“Should you be burning that?”

“Yes,” Simmons said, still in that low, certain tone. Her hand trembled as she fired up the torch. “It _REALLY_ doesn’t want me to.”

“How can you tell?” Fitz, even bitten and bleeding, was curious. _Bloody curious_. Ha.

“Because I keep thinking about blowtorching you,” Simmons answered through clenched teeth.

Skye glanced down at the girl at her feet. Woman. They were adults now. Both of them. But some things . . . “Don’t.” She walked up and pulled the torch out of Simmons’s hand.

“Skye, look . . .”

 _I should turn it on. Turn it on her_.

“No one is burning anyone, asshole.” _I’m talking to a telepathic psycho-bunny. Because this is my life_. She nudged the thing—with the flamethrower, just in case it got any ideas—off the table. It fell on top of Parker with a soft thump. Maybe she was imagining it, but she could swear something in the lines of her face eased.

“Skye!”

“She’s had the thing for twenty years, and managed it better than you two did for two days!”

“She killed someone! And bit me!”

“Oooh, I should clean that.”

Skye shrugged as Simmons hurried to pull out the first aid kit. “The biting was after we took it away, and the . . . other thing was when she was six. Also you shot her!”

Fitz huffed a sigh, rather than reiterating the biting thing, which Skye had to admit was very generous of him. She didn’t have the overwhelming desire to set Simmons on fire anymore.

“I think he’s happy.”

Fitz and Simmons both stared at her like she was an alien, but after Simmons finished bandaging Fitz’s arm, they helped her lift Parker into a chair, carefully avoiding contact with the bunny, now hugged tightly in her arms. None of them had seen it happen.

“How long till she wakes up?”

“Uh, not entirely sure, it’s the prototype, so the dosages are a wee bit off, and she was right in front of—”

Parker’s eyes blinked open.

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

She’d been drifting, somewhere deep and so cold that she felt warm in comparison, alone-not alone in the dark, she’d finally come to a stop.

It couldn’t last. She was good at freezing in place, but not at stopping. Cars go fast, tides go out, and everything falls at least once. The key is to not stop. The lock is everything else. She was good at getting past locks.

She’d come to a stop and it was tempting, so tempting to stay here in the cold dark. But she could feel herself being pulled toward the surface and she could feel her legs kicking beneath her; the two forces entirely different and essentially the same. She’d never been good at stopping.

Parker kicked her way into consciousness, only to discover that here her limbs didn’t obey her. Panic and noise and voices crashed around her. She needed to escape, to get clear, to take stock.

_Parker, get out of there!_

_Parker, stay right where you are!_

_Ignore ‘em. Take stock. Runnin’ ain’t everythin’._

She nodded, pleased to discover that was possible. _Take stock_. She was in a chair, a long padded one that laid her at an angle, cradling her head all the way down to her feet. Bunny, she found wedged between her arms and her chest. Beyond them, a lab: sharp tools, blowtorch, clearly labeled chemicals, a weird gun-shaped thing, and three people shouting at each other.

_Oooh, listen in! What are they shouting about?_

“All I’m saying—”

“Listen—”

“GUYS. STOP THIS.”

Parker shifted her attention to the last speaker, a girl in a lab coat who sounded a bit like Sophie.

“Our guest is awake, and both of you screaming at each other over, I’m not entirely sure what, leads me to believe it’s not you two really doing the screaming, yes?”

The other two, a lab coat boy and a non-lab coat girl, glanced at each other, frowning.

“You might have a point,” the boy said. His voice sounded like one of Sophie’s extra-silly accents. Parker giggled.

None of the three people now staring at her looked particularly dangerous. The boy with the funny accent had shot her, but now he kept fiddling with the end of a bandage on his hand, which unraveled further the more he messed with it.

The other two stared at her, momentarily speechless, which Parker didn’t mind, since she had no idea how she’d ended up in this chair. At least she had Bunny back.

Wait. Why did she have Bunny back?

The dark-haired girl smiled at her. “So, I’m guessing you have ques—”

“Why can’t I move?”

“Ah! That would be the dendrotoxin Fitz shot you with—sorry about that—one of the active ingredients in the rounds of the night-night gun—it’s an extract of snake venom that causes temporary paralysis and this is the prototype so I hadn’t gotten the dosages quite right also your metabolism might be—”

“Simmons. Chill.” Dark-hair rolled her eyes. “Nerds, am I right?”

The boy looked up from his disaster of a bandage. “That’s rich, comin’ from you.”

“You shot me with snake poison?” Parker asked. “Cool.” Vaguely, she was aware of tumblers rotating in her mind, fitting together in a different combination, but not quite there yet. “Who are you people?”

Dark-hair took charge again. “Jemma Simmons,” she said, pointing to the lab coat girl, who waved. “And Leo Fitz. He’s also a nerd, but he does mechanical nerdery, while Simmons’ is bio and medical shit.” She grinned. “I’m Skye,” she said, and something new entered her tone. “Just Skye.”

It was just a moment, a reflexive squeeze of Bunny in her lap and she understood what Skye was telling her. _I’m like you_.

She could feel the itch starting on the inside of her skull. _Run—No clear route to an exit—where’s the gun thing?—Distraction—in a lab they know better than me—Wait. WAIT!?!?!_ She clenched her jaw against the humming throb at the base of her neck. It made her teeth hurt. _YES. WAIT. Learn_.

“Parker,” she said. “Just Parker.”

Skye nodded, gave her a smile that didn’t mesh with Parker’s grasp of the situation. “We’re not going to hurt you. I’m a hacker. S.H.I.E.L.D. recruited me.”

“See? She’s also a nerd,” Fitz muttered.

“Fitz!” hissed Simmons. It felt familiar and new and comfortable and awkward. “Ignore him, he’s just not used to being bitten, and he’s a bit huffy about it.” She tilted her head, drawing a breath. “Now,” she began, somehow releasing most of her air on the first word before continuing, “I expect you have lots of questions and I would be happy to answer as many as I can.”

It was as if Hardison had split into three different people. _Run_ , echoed through her again, but the impulse was weaker now. She held Bunny carefully. “Why take him?” Bunny contained several thousand dollars in small, non-sequential bills and the key to a safety deposit box in a completely different city. But that wasn’t a reason for secret government agents.

“Your rabbit’s cursed,” Fitz said, giving up on the bandage. “It makes people do things. Bad things.”

“We don’t entirely understand how it—he—works yet.” Simmons bounced off the end of Fitz’s words, like Sophie sometimes did when Nate couldn’t be bothered to explain something. “But there seems to be some sort of psychotropic influence—”

“English, Simmons,” Skye interrupted.

“I am speaking English, _thankyouverymuch_.” She sighed. “He influences your thoughts and actions. Essentially turning an impulse into a compulsion.”

Parker stared at her. People were always telling her she was crazy, and now she’d met someone who thought a stuffed rabbit controlled her brain. _THAT_ was crazy.

“Listen, I know this sounds crazy,” Skye said, echoing her thoughts. “But you’re this super weird outlier who hasn’t died within like a year of having this thing. I went and read through all of Coulson’s reports. That’s our boss. He’s been trying to find this thing since before it got to you.”

“The suit man.” Her heart sped up as she whispered the words and she hugged Bunny closer. _Hugged_. She wiggled her fingers experimentally. They moved sluggishly, but they moved. “I’ve had Bunny for . . .” she paused. She was good with numbers and the way time accordioned, but he felt like a constant by now.

“Twenty years, just about,” Fitz offered. “Coulson went after it with Hawkeye back in the day.”

She nodded, dragging up a hazy memory of a rooftop, and a man carrying a bow and an easy smile. “He let me go. You all are terrible at catching people.”

“You’re sitting in our lab!”

“I chose to come here!” _Did I? I must have_. “And I found your invisible plane in the middle of the woods.” _That I definitely did_.

“Yeah, how did you do that again?” Skye asked. “Was it your hacker friend?”

“No, he didn’t—How do you know about Hardison?” She winced as her brain caught up with her mouth. _Why did I say his name?_

“HARDISON? YOUR HACKER IS _HARDISON_???” Skye gasped, bouncing up and down in excitement. “Dude, I’m good but he’s like a _genius_.”

Parker grinned. She didn’t trust them, not quite, but Skye’s open admiration of Hardison warmed the pit of her stomach.

“Can we get back to the fact that she found an invisible plane in the middle of the woods? ‘Cause that seems important,” Fitz said.

_Is it?_

_Yeah, girl, I’d say so._

_Why the hell didn’t you wake me?_

She didn’t have answers. “I just . . . I don’t . . .” Tire wheels spun wildly in mud . . . wheels . . . she’d driven here.

_Work it backward._

Backward. Back to the warehouse and before that back to Eliot’s and before that . . . running. In circles. Spinning tires in the mud.

_That’s not helpful, Nate. Parker, try starting with the things that do make sense._

_Map it out. Old school?_

_Exactly._

She flexed her fingers as she marked memories. “Warehouse. Shooting. Grazed my ear and made it tingle—”

“Ward hit you? He kept saying he did, but you definitely should’ve gone down with one shot—”

“Not many nerves or blood vessels in the ear, Fitz, so doubtful, actually . . .”

“Guys, hush.” Skye nodded encouragingly at Parker. “Go on.”

“Ran. Couldn’t stop.” _Why couldn’t I stop?_ She marked the question and moved on. “Got to . . . friend’s. Made cinnamon rolls. Fell asleep . . .” Everything got murky after that, like struggling to see in muddy water. “I remember dreaming and calling Hardison and calling the suit man and getting the van . . .” She shook her head. It didn’t help. Too many blindspots. Usually she liked blindspots, but now they gnawed at her.

Parker looked down at the top of Bunny’s head, the worn patches on his ears. She didn’t want to let go of him, but maybe that was a lie. “He made me do . . .” she stopped, shook her head. It was too big and too messy and she couldn’t grasp what that meant.

“Only to an extent, since you’re definitely not dead,” Skye or Simmons said, but she couldn’t distinguish it, the voice coming from somewhere far away.

“But everything . . .” she couldn’t breathe. The need to _RUN_ rose up like bile in her throat choking everything else back.

 _NO_. She rode it out, pointed and flexed her toes as if that was the same thing, until the room came back into focus.

“Hey! Parker. Hey.” Skye was crouched down beside her chair. “I don’t know _anything_ about where I came from. I gave myself a name and learned what I know and came here because I need to find out, because I know something is . . .” she trailed off and shook her head. “Something isn’t right and I want answers.”

Parker took a deep, careful breath. “I’m sitting in an invisible plane while nerds tell me a rabbit is controlling me. Why would you want these answers?”

“I don’t think it’s actually controlling you, is the thing,” Simmons broke in. “What did you just want to do?”

“Run.”

“Makes sense,” Fitz said. “But you didn’t.”

“Meanwhile, we definitely acted on the impulse to take the bunny out of the case, Fitz, who couldn’t hurt a fly actually shot you, and Skye gave you the bunny back, which she probably shouldn’t have done. It’s like you’ve built up a resistance. Like antibodies!” She grinned. “Or anti- _bunnies_.”

Fitz and Skye both groaned. “Okay, that’s it, you’re done.” Fitz said. “Anyway, we need to figure out what happens now. What do we tell Coulson?”

“Where did you send them anyway?” Skye asked. She winced slightly at Parker’s surprise. “We’re having some trust issues.”

“Back to my warehouse. It’s burned anyway.” _Burned_ _. . . Oh_. They weren’t going to like this. “What time is it?” Her head wasn’t quite back to normal, but seconds were beginning to feel like seconds again. How much time had she lost?

“Bit after six,” Fitz said, then at her stare, clarified, “Six eleven. And 38 seconds.”

She smiled at the seconds. “Sorry I bit you.”

“Long as you don’t have rabies, or anythin’.”

“No, but I do have a warehouse that’s going to go up in flames in twenty-three minutes and four seconds.” _Could any of the others get there in time?_

“WHAT? _WHY?_ ”

 _Because I wanted to tease Hardison with it, make him figure out the time, and watch it with me_. “Insurance. And I like magnesium.” How could she forget? Stupid. Fitz pulled out a phone.

“Tell your people to get out of the warehouse,” she ordered.

“They’re not picking up,” Fitz told her, his voice taking on a whine of worry. “What did you do to them?”

“Nothing! I just told the suit man—Coulson—I’d meet him there and forgot I hadn’t finished packing and look it’s going to take too long to explain.” _Plane. We’re in a plane_. “Can we fly the plane there?”

Fitz’s eyes widened. “No, we can’t fly the plane there!”

“None of us know how, for one thing,” Simmons said. “And for another May would murder us.”

Skye glanced through the glass doors to the cars parked beyond. “There is something we can fly . . .”

“Oh great, yeah, then Coulson would murder us.” Fitz’s fingers gripped his hair as he paced.

Skye rolled her eyes. “You used to be a car thief, right?” she asked Parker.

“Used to?” Then, her brain added one and one and . . . “YOU HAVE A FLYING CAR?”

 


	6. Chapter 6

“So why are you blowing up your own building?” Fitz asked from the back seat, where he sat, hugging a duffle of who knows what and very carefully not looking at the ground, approximately 600 feet below them. Simmons sat next to him, excitedly pointing at landmarks.

Parker sighed and raised her voice to be heard over the roar of the wind. “I’m not—I wasn’t blowing it up, just burning it down. Safer, and if you do it right, there’s an insurance payout!”

She’d wanted to drive . . . _fly_ . . . the car, which would only have been fair given that she was the one who hotwired it in the first place, but Skye won out with the dual arguments that she’d seen it done before, and if Coulson was going to murder anyone for touching Lola, it might as well be her, since she was already in the doghouse. That wasn’t much of a deterrent to Parker, but the car had a name, and she kept thinking of Lucille. Hackers were weird about their vehicles.

“So they’ll have time to notice the smoke and get out, yeah?”

“No.” She should have explained this earlier, but they’d needed to move. Now that they were moving . . . “They would have, but I didn’t get to finish moving all of my stuff out before I was interrupted. So there’s C4, semtex, thermite, fireworks . . . other stuff . . .”

“Why do you need all that stuff??”

 _Shape charges on vaults, when I’m in a hurry_. “I like big booms.” She could see the river now, as they cruised down to the warehouses by the docks. There. “Drop me on the roof.”

Skye hesitated, “It’s too high. Parker, we have less than a minute.”

“So stop arguing!” 49 seconds.

“No! You’re not thinking straight! There’s no time!”

Parker smiled at the rush of certainty that coursed through her. “There is.” She hugged Bunny to her and jumped.

Once, during a movie night Hardison’d convinced Nate to have by telling him he could choose the movie, they’d watched a western about a crew robbing banks and trains and running, always running, once over a cliff into roaring rapids below. _I can’t swim—Are you crazy? The fall will prob’ly kill ya!_ She’d liked the movie but the blue-eyed laughing man was wrong. Falls didn’t kill you. Stopping did. If you did it wrong. The trick was to keep going.

Parker leapt out away from the flying car, gauging the distance to the roof as she fell. 30 . . . 20 . . . 10 . . . she touched down with both feet parallel, immediately bouncing back up and into a roll forward to spread out the impact. It still hurt, somewhere distant and unimportant.

Mental seconds ticked by as she dashed across the rooftop, stuffing Bunny in her shirt to keep her hands clear. Disable security, open skylight, scramble down the scaffolding. Okay, it was more of a controlled fall, shaving precious seconds off her time. Across the huge room she could make out the shapes of people. _Was that—?_

She landed awkwardly, felt her ankle twist beneath her, tucked her head and rolled to prevent further damage. Regaining her feet, it twinged painfully but held. Good enough to get where she was going.

“P-Parker?” called a familiar voice.

In the corner nearer to her, the device ignited.

No time to ask why Hardison was here, and if he was here . . . “GET EVERYONE OUT,” she screamed. The countdown began again, this time a quick, desperate addition of burn rates through a flimsy barrier of cardboard to a stack of fireworks she’d never gotten a chance to load.

She stamped at flames twisting hungry tendrils, but it wasn’t enough, her mental addition falling short in the onslaught of the fire.

Time didn’t slow, because time didn’t work like that. But something clicked and she knew what to do and how to do it and that it would work as long as she didn’t stop.

She ignored the shouts behind her, _why did they never listen_ , and, pushing Bunny in front her, flung her body onto the stack of igniting boxes.

All around her was chaos and noise and the acrid smell of burning plastic, paper, and possibly other things she should be thinking about.

A familiar pair of rough hands yanked her backward, still clutching the charred remains of Bunny. Eliot pushed her into Sophie and went to join the others in beating out the fire, cowed now under the combined efforts of a crew of criminals and a team of secret agents. Simmons sprinted up and blasted a fire extinguisher, dousing them all in a spray of white foam.

Silence fell as thickly and immediately as the foam, and in the sudden stillness she heard herself giggling and couldn’t stop, even when Sophie started shaking her. She kept laughing and hugging Bunny tighter and tighter until he crumbled into ashes in her arms.

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

Slowly, the world reassembled itself, first in the pressure of Sophie’s arms around her and the flow of words trickling from her lips into Parker’s ears. They didn’t carry any meaning with them, but Parker was sure they were the right words, because Sophie always knew the right words. It’s like a whole new set of lock picks, Sophie’s words. She almost giggled at that, but it turned into a cough instead, clearing the ashes of Bunny from her chest and throat and lungs.

It hurt. She took satisfaction in the rightness of the fact, spat, and stood up, ignoring the exclamations from Sophie and Hardison to take it easy.

Stepping past them, and past a belligerent Nate and Eliot, she faced Phil Coulson.

“Hello, Parker,” he said. “It’s nice to see you again.”

Her memories of a rooftop, and the later meeting in juvie were hazy at best, a delirium spent surviving with her head down and back to a corner. But it had broken the monotony. She remembered the power of choosing not to speak.

She took her time now, too, enjoying the tick of seconds she could relish. Parker met his eyes and held them, fully aware that most people didn’t like it when she did that. She deliberately brushed the ash from her shirt, dusted her hands together in quick passes of slipping claps as the small cloud of ash settled between them. She didn’t want to think about what the ash had been, shoved a screaming part of her into a dark corner to face later.

“If you want to take me in . . .” she stopped, tried to draw saliva into a mouth gone dry.

“I don’t want to take you in,” Coulson shook his head. “I wouldn’t mind recruiting you . . .” he held up a hand at the rumbling snarl from Eliot. Parker didn’t have to turn around to know Nate had put a hand on his arm, holding her hitter back. “But I’m not enough of an idiot to make the offer.” He gestured down at the dusting of ash. “My assignment is and always has been retrieving the 0-8-4. As it’s been destroyed, it’s no longer a S.H.I.E.L.D. concern.”

“Sir—” Simmons interrupted. Parker focused on the way she bounced up on the balls of her feet when she said it.

“Ah, yes, Simmons would, however, like to examine you—with your consent—to make sure there are no lasting side effects.” At her hesitation, he added, “Your people can come along, just don’t _touch_ anything for god sake.”

Hardison came up next to her, bumping her lightly on the shoulder. Her fingers found his and slid in to make a perfect fit. “Hey girl, it’s totally up to you.”

It’s one more choice, the first of many that she’d have to make alone. Or . . . “What do you think?”

“As I said, it’s up to you, but I mean, I’m down with seein’ a super-secret spy plane.”

“It’s invisible,” she told him, and Hardison’s whole body vibrated in excitement. She’d wanted to show him a burning building, and he’d ended up inside it, which was, in Hardison terms, worse. But she could show him an invisible plane instead.

And that was a decision made. “Okay,” she said to Simmons. “We’ll meet you there.”

Nate didn’t go with them; Eliot said something about sending him on an errand, and Sophie said something about him not liking needles. Nate didn’t say anything about either, but he pulled her into a tight hug, ignoring the ash covering her shirt, and for the second time in two days asked if she was okay.

For the second time in two days, she gave him a nod and a smile and decided that both were about as true as they could be.

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

“How’s your head?” Coulson poured two fingers each into two glasses and set one down in front of May.

“I’ll live. At least I’m not sleeping off eight of those night-night rounds like Ward is.”

“We really need a better name for those things.” He took a small sip, set his glass down. “They’re a good team. I forgot what it felt like, having a team that in sync with each other. We’re not there yet.”

“We’ll get there.” She watched him, her steady gaze taking his measure. He matched her, enjoying how meeting her eyes wasn’t a challenge. “Have you told them?”

“Told who?”

“Barton and Romanoff. The team you’re thinking of right now. Have you told them you caught the one that got away?”

“We weren’t much of a team when we were hunting that thing back then. Romanoff wasn’t even around and Barton—anyway they think I’m dead now.” He picked up the glass again, stared into the amber depths of the whiskey. “Fury thought it was best.”

“You were their handler. I wasn’t at New York, but Phil—” She cut herself off, as she so often did, pausing right at the brink of investment.

“I know.”

He waited as she stood, drained the glass, and left the room without a backward glance. Strange, how hard this was. He pulled up his screen, and rather than typing any of the contact numbers he knew, he pulled up the security feed for the lab instead.

Simmons was examining Parker, while Skye tried to keep her cool around Hardison, and Eliot glowered in a corner, making Fitz nervous enough that he kept dropping whatever he was tinkering with. The other two, Sophie and Nate, hadn’t come, though they’d offered after Parker, to Coulson’s surprise, agreed to Simmons’s poking and prodding. They all felt familiar, like something he knew, but hadn’t quite reached yet. _Parents and the kids_. He smiled, and decided not to share that particular observation with May.

Instead he finally did what he’d been avoiding. He’d get hell for it later from Fury, but somehow, he didn’t quite care as much as he once had.

She answered on the third ring. “Yes.”

“Agent Romanoff. Natasha. It’s Phil Coulson.” The pause at the other end of the line gained weight and heft. “How’s Barton?”

“You died in New York.” It was a statement, hard and flat.

He’d become practiced at his glibness, but Natasha wasn’t looking for glib. Natasha, he knew from those five words and fourteen years of work, was looking for absolution. “Not permanently, as it turns out.” _You did not fail_. “I can’t be the first person in your life to come back from the dead.”

“No, but you are certainly the most boring.” She’d recovered then.

Coulson repeated his question, “How’s Clint?”

“He says he’s fine.”

“That bad, huh?” Typical Barton, to downplay something that traumatic.

“This . . . you . . . it’s Fury’s doing, isn’t it.” He couldn’t help smiling at her testing the waters. Always looking for an angle.

“He gave me a plane, let me compile a hodpodge team of newbies, and barely yelled at me when we wrecked it almost immediately.”

“Barely yelled?”

“For Fury, anyway.” He traced a meaningless, familiar pattern on his desk. “They’re rough still. But we’ve completed a few missions. Finished one today that the three of us never managed back in the day.” He started moving before he was even aware he’d stood up. “Let me talk to Barton.”

For all the years that stretched between their first mission and now, he could hear the same frenetic weariness in his voice the moment Natasha passed over the phone. “You’re not dead.”

“So they keep telling me.” He switched to a video feed, so Hawkeye could see for himself.

The smile the other man gave him seemed like it took too much effort, but he made it genuine. “Tasha said you have a new team?”

“Yeah, we found an 0-8-4 today. You remember a little girl and her bunny?”

He’d reached the lab, and everyone looked up, because he was the boss after all. Parker, sitting on Simmons’s table, cocked her head.

“Yeah. I remember. Twenty years of you giving me shit for it, how can I forget?”

Parker’s eyes widened. Coulson held out the phone and she hopped off the table, turning it toward her. “Hello, roof man.”

Coulson just managed to catch Barton’s surprised laugh before she disappeared to the back of the cargo hold.

“Who’s that?” Hardison asked, the warning edge perfectly clear, even without Spencer lurking behind him.

“Hawkeye,” Coulson told him, maybe enjoying the rejoining gasps a bit too much. “Clint tracked her down when we first discovered she had the 0-8-4. He should have brought her in, but he made a different call. He does that.” He nodded over to where Parker had disappeared. “Thought she might remember him. Thought he might like to see how that call turned out.”

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

Something was quietly breaking behind the eyes of the girl—woman—on the screen of his phone. She didn’t seem to notice. Or if she did, she ignored it, and how could he blame her, when he’d been trying and failing to do the exact same thing.

“How are you?” he asked, a stupid, pointless question probably. It felt like it, these days. “You don’t have to answer that.”

“Good. Because it’s a stupid question.”

Clint huffed out a laugh. “Yeah. It is.”

“I have a name now. Parker. I’m Parker.”

“A superhero named Parker?”

She shook her head. “I’m not super. Or a hero. I’m a thief.”

Clint winced. God, he hoped his parenting skills were better now. “I’m sorry. I should have—”

“But I help people. I have friends and we . . . sometimes the wrong thing is the right thing to do. You helped me.” She grinned at him, like sunshine. “I’m very good at falling now.”

He couldn’t help but match her smile. “Listen. It’s gonna feel like falling, except you don’t know when the ground is coming up and there’s no way to get ready for when it does. But your people. If you’ve got people you can trust—they’ll catch you. Even when it doesn’t feel possible. You got that?”

She nodded. “You sound like you’re telling yourself that too.”

“I am. Every day. It’s still true.”


	7. Chapter 7

Leverage Headquarters smelled like cinnamon rolls. It overwhelmed her for a moment, when she, Hardison, and Eliot walked in, Eliot immediately heading for the kitchen to make sure Nate wasn’t burning them.

“Jus’ ‘cause I trust ya to pick ‘em up from my apartment, don’t mean I trust ya not to burn them,” he grumbled, bending over to peer into the oven.

“I’m perfectly capable of—”

“Nate, darling, any sentence that you begin with ‘I’m perfectly capable’ has already lost you the higher ground.” Sophie stepped over to Parker, enveloping her in a warm hug, her fingers stroking the back of Parker’s head. She closed her eyes, letting everything else fade into the background, and leaned into the pressure. After too long and not long enough, Sophie released her, placing her hands on Parker’s shoulders and studying her. “Hmm, shower next, off you go.”

Parker glanced down at her filthy clothes and climbed the stairs.

It wasn’t until the hot water in Nate’s shower sluiced over her head that she’d realized she’d obeyed Sophie, just like Eliot sometimes did. She didn’t know how she felt about that.

She didn’t know how she felt about anything.

Eventually Hardison came and rapped his knuckles on the door, asking in his soft careful voice if she was okay in there. The voice, even muffled through the door, sounded like his eyes that always smiled when they looked at her, and she didn’t know how she felt about that either, but if they smelled anything like Eliot’s cinnamon rolls then she’d probably like both right about now.

No one yelled at her when she decided the best place to eat a cinnamon roll was on the couch, though Eliot did roll his eyes and bring her a plate. They did taste like Hardison’s eyes, though she didn’t tell either of them that, swallowing the words along with the gooey dough and licking icing off her lips.

Hardison watched her, trying hard not to be obvious by playing with his phone and failing at it worse than Eliot, who kept himself busy in the kitchen, glancing up only every 13 seconds or so. Nate sat at the table, ostensibly reading a file, but he hadn’t turned a page in over a minute.

Sophie didn’t pretend. She sat across from her and waited for her to finish the cinnamon roll and carefully lick her fingers. Finally the question came. “Do you feel different?”

“No.” She did feel odd, but Simmons had explained that she might experience dopamine withdrawals and given her something she’d concocted to help, and Simmons, like Maggie, like Clint on the phone who smiled with haunted eyes, was honest and could be trusted. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she did.

It wasn’t that she felt different, exactly. She was still her. She tested it: wriggling toes curled warm into the bends of her knees, tracing the peaks and valleys of her teeth with her tongue, counting out the seconds and footfalls of Eliot making his way to an unoccupied section of couch.

“What if me isn’t Parker anymore?” she finally whispered. The question had wormed its way in when talking to Hawkeye, the weight of his own name resting heavy on his face. If anyone else would understand, it would be Sophie who was not Sophie, her real name captured in a keypad locking a mostly empty warehouse.

Sophie tapped her fingers on her knee, but before she could answer, Nate from across the room asked, “Why wouldn’t you still be Parker?”

“For those of us who choose our names, it’s significant, _Nathan_ ,” Sophie said, infusing his name with layered secrets Parker didn’t bother to ask about. “Names are about who you choose to be.”

Eliot made a face. A series of them actually, but it settled into his usual scowl at the end. “The name you use don’t change who you are. It don’t change what you do, or think, or the choices you make.” He shrugged. “It’s like a coat. Some might suit better’n others, but you’re the same underneath it.”

“Now that’s just ridiculous, clothes change everything—”

“Don’t go givin’ her an identity crisis just ‘cause you had one!”

Nate pinched his nose and wisely did not get involved.

Hardison leaned in close, ignoring Eliot and Sophie’s arguing. “Look,” he said, low and careful, “if you don’t feel like Parker anymore, that’s fine. But if you’re worried you ain’t Parker because of a magic toy, well, that’s different.”

“How?” She wasn’t who she’d been before Bunny. That name wouldn’t fall right – not from the lips of anyone still alive.

“Well, ‘cause the Parker I know might be great at jumpin’ off crazy high buildings and might like fire a bit too much, but she also rescues whole orphanages of children, takes on a Steranko to save someone she cares about, and just leapt on a pile of flaming explosives.”

“Those were all impulsive. What if I’m not that anymore?” She twisted cold fingers into knots.

“Nah,” he smiled, so certain. “Impulsive would’ve been going in without a plan. We all saw those blueprints. Hell, you’re basically Nate.”

“This is s’pposed to be a pep talk, Hardison,” Eliot growled. He winked at her, ignoring Nate’s glare behind him. “The point is intention. You feel in control?”

Earlier today, jumping out of a flying car she’d felt in control. She’d known the distance to the roof, the speed she’d fall, the way to land without hurting herself. But all of that had been with Bunny tucked inside her shirt, just like when she was a kid.

_Except I didn’t know those things as a kid. I got hurt a lot. I learned. I couldn’t stop stealing so I learned how to be a thief. I kept burning things so I learned ignition points. I learned how to fall and get back up. I learned from Kelly, and Archie, and Nate._

“It’s okay if you don’t, you know,” Hardison said, shifting slightly so their shoulders touched. “That’s the point of having people. A team. A family. Anything you need help with, whether it’s a pissed off Rottweiler of a security system or a bunny-related impulse control issue. You got that?”

She looked up, found all of them watching her. “Yes,” she told them, not entirely sure if she was answering Eliot’s question, or Hardison’s, or both. Both sounded just about right. “Um,” she began, wiping suddenly sweating palms on her thighs. “My warehouse. I got interrupted, packing it up, and I still need to finish . . .” It was hard, asking. Harder than being in control. Maybe she shouldn’t—

“Aw right! Movin’ party! Typically you bribe people by offerin’ pizza an’ beer, but we got ourselves an Eliot—” Eliot interjected a growl here, that Hardison ignored, “and a Nate—”

“Wait, Hardison, what am I—”

“I got Lucille, and Sophie can delegate, ‘cause y’know she’s gonna do that anyway . . .” he trailed off, suddenly worried. “I mean, if that’s what you want.”

“I was going to invite you for the burning part anyway,” she told Hardison. She took a deep breath. “Willyouhelpmepackmystuff?”

“We’d be happy to,” Sophie answered for all of them. Nate gave her one of his half smiles and Eliot that steady-eyed nod of his.

“Tomorrow,” he added firmly, settling down on the couch next to her, closer than he usually allowed. A Parker sandwich. “Time to stop for a bit.”

She kicked her legs, a sudden awareness of how tired she was at war with the urge to move on to the next thing. Eliot didn’t say anything, just shifted closer until the pressure and warmth from his thigh seeped into her, grounding her between him and Hardison.

“I have a present for you,” Hardison murmured as Nate and Sophie drifted off, bickering about something. He took out a small lump of worn yellow fur, attached to a small chain at one end. “Found this on the ground. And fixed it up while Skye an’ me were talkin.”

She took it carefully, waiting for something in her to spark, but whatever had been there, it wasn’t anymore. Still, she found herself running her fingers over the fur, squeezing it slightly.

“Rabbit’s feet are supposed to be lucky, which, nasty, but hey, least this one has a chance of bein’ legit?” He nudged her, sounding hopeful.

_It isn’t luck. It’s trial and error. It’s broken bones, burned fingers, burned homes, aliases, people. It’s being afraid of nothing and everything and all the right and wrong things can’t sort themselves out. It’s learning that there’s a line after you’ve already crossed it and what’s done is done. It’s only trusting yourself because you can’t be trusted further than you can be thrown, but you know how far that is._

Two days ago she’d gone into a building with a plan. It failed. But she hadn’t. She’d asked for help and they were already there. _I learned that too_.

Parker closed her hand tightly over the final piece of her Bunny and leaned her head on Hardison’s shoulder, catching Eliot watching her out of the corner of his eye. “Who needs luck?”

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> kiss_me_cassie, i hope you liked it! Thank you so much for the amazing prompts, they took me somewhere I never even thought to go on my own.
> 
> If anyone's curious, the prompts used were:   
> Any combination of Parker, Eliot and/or Hardison dealing with the supernatural.  
> A crossover with the MCU. (added a bit of comics!Clint's backstory)  
> Eliot learning about Parker's past and giving her space but also helping her to deal with it.
> 
> Kudos and comments are always appreciated, and I'm pagerunner over on tumblr if you want to yell at me further :P


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